Opinion ID: 4022381
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: jurisdiction

Text: Fontanillas next appeals both the award of attorneys' fees to the defendants and the district court's denial of her Rule 59(e) motion for reconsideration of that award. The defendants accept that this court has jurisdiction over the latter appeal but argue that we do not have jurisdiction over the former. This distinction could matter: on appeal from the denial of a Rule 59(e) motion, it is not fully settled to what extent the reviewing court may revisit the underlying judgment, see McKenna v. Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., 693 F.3d 207, 213–14 & n.5 (1st Cir. 2012), and, in any event, Rule 59(e) relief is granted sparingly, and only when 'the original judgment evidenced a manifest error of law, if there is newly discovered evidence, or in certain other narrow situations,' Biltcliffe v. CitiMortgage, Inc., 772 F.3d 925, 930 (1st Cir. 2014) (quoting Global Naps, Inc. v. Verizon New Eng., Inc., 489 F.3d 13, 25 (1st Cir. 2007)); see also Ira Green, - 9 - Inc. v. Military Sales & Serv. Co., 775 F.3d 12, 28 (1st Cir. 2014) ([R]evising a final judgment [pursuant to Rule 59(e)] is an extraordinary remedy . . . .). Whether we have jurisdiction to entertain the merits of Fontanillas's challenge to the attorneys' fees award turns on whether the notice of appeal seeking review of that award was timely. A civil appellant must typically file a notice of appeal within 30 days after entry of the judgment or order appealed from. Fed. R. App. P. 4(a)(1)(A). The district court entered its order granting attorneys' fees to the defendants on November 18, 2014, and Fontanillas filed her notice of appeal as to that order on February 23, 2015--well outside the usual 30-day window. Without more, this timeline would defeat our jurisdiction over the appeal. See McKenna, 693 F.3d at 213 ([I]t is settled that a civil appeal filed out of time is barred, [and] that the error in timing cannot be waived . . . .). There is a relevant exception, however. When a litigant files a timely Rule 59(e) motion asking the district court to reconsider a judgment, the time to file an appeal of the underlying judgment runs . . . from the entry of the order disposing of the Rule 59(e) motion. Fed. R. App. P. 4(a)(4)(A)(iv). Here, Fontanillas filed a Rule 59(e) motion within the requisite 28 days, see Fed. R. Civ. P. 59(e), after entry of the fees award. The district court then dispos[ed] of, Fed. R. - 10 - App. P. 4(a)(4)(A)(iv), that timely motion on January 23, 2015, by rejecting it as overlength, and Fontanillas filed her notice of appeal of the underlying fees award within 30 days of that disposition. It would seem, then, that Fontanillas has appropriately availed herself of an exception to the normal jurisdictional window for appeal. The defendants nonetheless respond that when the district court rejected Fontanillas's timely filed Rule 59(e) motion as overlength, it struck that motion from the record entirely. By taking this step, the defendants argue, the district court created a record that treated Fontanillas's Rule 59(e) motion as though it had never been filed and, in so doing, rendered Fontanillas's submission of that timely but noncompliant motion incapable of having delayed, or tolled, the beginning of the 30day appeal window triggered by the November 18, 2014, fees award. Because we have already upheld the district court's decision to restrict Fontanillas's timely but noncompliant Rule 59(e) motion to the ordinarily applicable page limits, and because Fontanillas raises no challenge to the district court's act of striking that motion as the specific means of enforcing its decision, the determinative question is whether, as defendants urge, the order striking Fontanillas's timely motion from the record vitiated the tolling effect that the motion would have had if the district court - 11 - had simply denied it, whether on the merits or for noncompliance with the local rules, without striking it. At first glance, our decision in Air Line Pilots Ass'n v. Precision Valley Aviation, Inc., 26 F.3d 220 (1st Cir. 1994), would seem to suggest so. In Air Line Pilots, the appellant had filed a timely Rule 59(e) motion in the district court, seeking reconsideration of a summary judgment order. Id. at 222. The motion, however, failed to comply with an applicable local rule. Id. The clerk of court refused to accept the noncompliant motion for filing, and the district court endorsed the clerk of court's exclusion of the motion from the record. Id. Although the appellant then submitted a compliant Rule 59(e) motion, the statutory window for filing original Rule 59(e) motions had closed in the interim, and the district court rejected the compliant motion as untimely. Id. at 222–23. The appellant filed a notice of appeal as to the underlying summary judgment order within 30 days of the order rejecting the compliant but untimely Rule 59(e) motion (though not within 30 days of the summary judgment order itself nor of the district court's endorsement of the clerk's exclusion of the noncompliant filing from the record). Id. at 223. We held that we lacked jurisdiction over the appeal. Id. at 226. An untimely Rule 59(e) motion does not toll the 30-day window for filing an appeal, id. at 223–24, and we held that the untimely Rule 59(e) - 12 - motion could not relate back to the filing date of the timely but noncompliant Rule 59(e) motion because--critically--that earlier motion, having never become part of the record, was a nullity, id. at 225. The defendants seize upon this characterization of a motion that never became part of the record and seek to extend it to a motion that was filed and then later struck. But central to the reasoning in Air Lines Pilots was a critical factor altogether absent here. Specifically, the New Hampshire Local Rules at issue in Air Line Pilots expressly stated that [t]he Clerk shall not accept any motions not in compliance with procedures outlined in these Rules. Id. at 224 n.5 (alteration in original) (quoting D.N.H. Civ. R. 11(a)(1) (1994)). That provision, we found, both confirmed that the local rules do not accord a noncompliant motion any force or effect, id. at 225, and provided an explicit[] warn[ing] or red flag[] for litigants as to the inevitable consequence of noncompliance, id. at 224. Eliminating any lingering doubt as to the local rules' treatment of noncompliant motions was the district court's statement in its order refusing the noncompliant motion that the old motion was dead and that a new motion, having a new filing date, would be required. Id. at 225. Here, in contrast, there is nothing in Puerto Rico's local rules warning a litigant that an overlength motion or, for - 13 - that matter, an otherwise noncompliant motion, such as a motion that lacks page numbers or a motion that is not stapled or otherwise attached, D.P.R. Civ. R. 7(d), is to be given no tolling effect whatsoever, even if initially accepted for filing. Nor did the district court construe the local rules to require as much. The district court's order striking Fontanillas's noncompliant Rule 59(e) motion reads: ORDER denying . . . Motion for Leave to File motion in excess of pages allowed by local rule [7(d)]. [Fontanillas's Rule 59(e) motion, as well as her Rule 60(b) motion and accompanying memorandum] are hereby stricken from the record. Should the plaintiff wish to re-file these motions, they must comply with the local rules' page limit. Nothing in this order implies that the motion was wholly without effect during the period it sat, as in fact filed, under the district court's consideration. That said, Air Line Pilots did suggest in dicta that New Hampshire's local rules may not have been dispositive to that case's outcome. The Air Line Pilots court observed that the local rule directing the clerk of court to refuse any noncompliant filings was in tension with a then-current provision of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure--substantially identical to today's Rule 5(d)(4)--which provided that [t]he clerk shall not refuse to accept for filing any paper presented for that purpose solely because it is not presented in proper form as required by [the - 14 - Federal Rules of Civil Procedure] or any local rules or practices. Air Line Pilots, 26 F.3d at 227 n.7 (alteration in original) (quoting Fed. R. Civ. P. 5(e) (1994)). Observing that the appellant had waived any reliance on the federal rule, the court nevertheless opined in dicta that this waiver was likely harmless because the district court's endorsement of the clerk's refusal to file the noncompliant motion le[ft] the record in essentially the same posture as though the motion had been received and then stricken. Id. The court thus implied that, even had the appellant successfully challenged New Hampshire's local rule, the district court would have had authority to nullify the noncompliant Rule 59(e) motion and that striking the motion from the record would have been equivalent to doing so. Whatever the force of this dicta, it was issued in the context of a different jurisdictional question than the one we face here. In Air Line Pilots, the appellant had not filed a notice of appeal within 30 days of the district court's endorsement of the clerk's refusal to file the noncompliant Rule 59(e) motion. It was therefore immaterial whether that endorsement was itself an order disposing of, Fed. R. App. P. 4(a)(4)(A), a Rule 59(e) motion: even had we found it to be such an order, such that it-- rather than the underlying summary judgment order--triggered the onset of the 30-day window for appeal, the appellant's notice of appeal would have been untimely regardless. Accordingly, the - 15 - appellant in Air Line Pilots relied instead on the argument that a later-filed compliant motion could relate back to the date of a timely but noncompliant motion that had not become part of the record, and it was this argument that Air Line Pilots rejected. We need not determine, then, whether Air Line Pilots' rejection of that argument controls where, as here, there is no local rule providing that a noncompliant motion is a nullity or indeed where the district court specifically invites re-filing after striking a noncompliant motion. Cf. Lexon Ins. Co. v. Naser, 781 F.3d 335, 339–40 (6th Cir. 2015) (an invited revision of a timely but noncompliant Rule 59(e) motion related back to the filing date of the original, noncompliant motion, even though that original motion had been stricken from the record). Even assuming that it does, the district court's order rejecting Fontanillas's Rule 59(e) motion for its noncompliance with the local rules was an order disposing of that motion, Fed. R. App. P. 4(a)(4)(A)(iv), notwithstanding the fact that the order dispos[ed] of the Rule 59(e) motion by, in particular, striking it from the record. Interpreting the order not as a disposition of a botched motion but rather as some sort of incantation that not only voided the noncompliant Rule 59(e) motion's future effects but also conclusively established that the motion had never existed in the first place would render the order striking that nonexistent motion a logical incongruity and, more importantly, would allow - 16 - metaphysical niceties to deprive the parties of a resolution on the merits. See Krupski v. Costa Crociere S. p. A., 560 U.S. 538, 550 (2010) (describing the preference expressed in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in general . . . for resolving disputes on their merits).6 We therefore hold that, at least barring any sort of contrary contextual indicators in the local rules or in the district court's interpretation of those rules, a district court's order striking a Rule 59(e) motion from the record for noncompliance with local rules is an order disposing of that motion, such that the order's entry represents the beginning of the 30-day window for appealing the judgment that forms the underlying subject of the Rule 59(e) motion. Therefore, Fontanillas's noncompliant Rule 59(e) motion of December 16, 2014, tolled the onset of the 30-day window for appeal of the attorneys' fees award until the district court disposed of that motion by striking it from the record on January 23, 2015. As a result, 6 We recognize that the Sixth Circuit's opinion in Lexon Insurance Co. v. Naser, 781 F.3d 335 (6th Cir. 2015), declined to treat a district court's order striking a noncompliant Rule 59(e) motion as an order disposing of that motion where the order invited re-filing and so lacked the requirements of finality integral to an order 'disposing of' a motion, id. at 339. Lexon, however, rejected the proposition that we here assume to be true --that even an expressly invited revision of a timely but noncompliant motion that has been struck from the record does not relate back to the date of the original, timely motion, see id. at 339–40--so that case's persuasive force is correspondingly attenuated. - 17 - Fontanillas's February 23, 2015, notice of appeal as to the fees award was timely filed, and, our jurisdiction assured, we may now turn to the merits of that appeal.