Opinion ID: 4458371
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: jurisdiction

Text: According to IPRL, ZTE’s failure to file a cross-appeal deprives us of jurisdiction to remand as to non-instituted grounds. Setting aside whether a cross-appeal was even required, we disagree that the cross-appeal rule should be treated as a jurisdictional requirement. It is well-established that the filing deadline for a notice of appeal is jurisdictional. For example, in Bowles v. Russell, 551 U.S. 205 (2007), a habeas petitioner failed to file his appeal within the 30-day time limit established by 28 U.S.C. § 2107(a) and Fed. R. App. Proc. 4(a)(1)(A). The Supreme Court held that this failure created a jurisdictional defect. Bowles, 551 U.S. at 208. In doing so, IN RE: IPR LICENSING, INC. 13 however, the Supreme Court carefully distinguished “between court-promulgated rules and limits enacted by Congress.” Id. at 211–12. The latter are jurisdictional, because they are established by Congress, but the former are not. Id. at 212. The Supreme Court again emphasized this distinction, between court-made rules and statutory rules, in Hamer v. Neighborhood Hous. Servs. of Chicago, 138 S. Ct. 13 (2017). There, the petitioner sought and received a sixty-day extension to file a notice of appeal from the district court under Fed. R. App. Proc. 4(a)(5)(C). Hamer, 138 S. Ct. at 18. The problem for the petitioner was that Rule 4(a)(5)(C) limits extensions to thirty days. The Court of Appeals therefore concluded, acting sua sponte, that Rule 4(a)(5)(C) imposed a jurisdictional deadline that the district court could not extend. Id. It therefore dismissed the case as untimely filed. Id. But the Supreme Court disagreed, concluding that Rule 4(a)(5)(C) is not jurisdictional because “the relevant time prescription is absent from the U.S. Code.” Id. at 21. That distinguished the case from Bowles, in which the time prescription was rooted in statute. Id. (“In conflating Rule 4(a)(5)(C) with § 2107(c), the Court of Appeals failed to grasp the distinction our decisions delineate between jurisdictional appeal filing deadlines and mandatory claim-processing rules, and therefore misapplied Bowles.”). IPRL has not identified any statutory basis for the deadline to file a cross-appeal. Indeed, there is none. For example, 28 U.S.C. § 2107(a) sets the deadline for notices of appeal without mention of cross-appeals. See also 35 U.S.C. § 142 (same). The cross-appeal deadline is instead rooted in the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure. See Fed. R. App. Proc. 4(a)(3). But, as the Court recognized in Hamer, that is not enough to mark the deadline as jurisdictional. 138 S. Ct. at 17. Rather, “a provision governing the time to appeal in a civil action qualifies as jurisdictional only if Congress sets the time.” Id. at 17 14 IN RE: IPR LICENSING, INC. (emphasis added). Congress has not done so here. The cross-appeal deadline is therefore properly treated as a claim-processing rule, i.e., it “promote[s] the orderly progress of litigation by requiring that the parties take certain procedural steps at certain specified times” but does not withdraw a case from our jurisdiction. Id. (quoting Henderson v. Shinseki, 562 U.S. 428, 435 (2011)). The Sixth Circuit addressed this question in Gunter v. Bemis Co., 906 F.3d 484 (6th Cir. 2018), and reached the same result. After discussing Bowles and Hamer, the court explained that “only deadlines reflected in statutes, not those spelled out just in the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure, count as jurisdictional.” Gunter, 906 F.3d at 492. It therefore concluded that “a timely notice of appeal is a jurisdictional requirement. . . . [b]ut a timely notice of cross-appeal is not.” Id. at 492–93; see also Mathias v. Superintendent Frackville SCI, 876 F.3d 462, 471 (3d Cir. 2017) (same), cert. denied sub nom. Mathias v. Brittain, 138 S. Ct. 1707 (2018). Rather than identify a statutory basis for the cross-appeal deadline, IPRL relies on Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Co. v. Chemque, Inc., 303 F.3d 1294 (Fed. Cir. 2002). In that case, we concluded that a party’s failure to cross-appeal invalidity issues deprived us of jurisdiction to consider those issues. Minnesota Mining, 303 F.3d at 1309 (“[E]ven a liberal construction of the notice requirement [from Rule 3(c)(1)(B)] in this case warrants finding that there is no jurisdiction since the notice of appeal for the cross-appeal does not even mention validity is- sues. . . . [W]e do not have jurisdiction to consider them.”). But Minnesota Mining predates Bowles and Hamer, which delineated a more precise line between jurisdictional and claim-processing rules. See Hamer, 138 S. Ct. at 21 (explaining that several courts of appeals, and even some Supreme Court opinions, had been “less than meticulous” in using the term jurisdictional); see also Gonzalez v. Thaler, 565 U.S. 134, 141 (2012) (“Recognizing our ‘less than IN RE: IPR LICENSING, INC. 15 meticulous’ use of the term [jurisdictional] in the past, we have pressed a stricter distinction between truly jurisdictional rules, which govern ‘a court’s adjudicatory authority,’ and nonjurisdictional ‘claim-processing rules,’ which do not.”). IPRL’s reliance on Minnesota Mining is therefore unpersuasive in light of Bowles and Hamer. “Where intervening Supreme Court precedent makes clear that our earlier decisions mischaracterized the [jurisdictional] effects of § 281, we are bound to follow that precedent rather than our own prior panel decisions.” Lone Star Silicon Innovations LLC v. Nanya Tech. Corp., 925 F.3d 1225, 1235 (Fed. Cir. 2019) (citing Troy v. Samson Mfg. Corp., 758 F.3d 1322, 1326 (Fed. Cir. 2014)). Accordingly, we agree with ZTE that its failure to file a cross-appeal—assuming one was required—does not mean we lack the authority to remand as to the non-instituted grounds. We therefore turn to whether remand is appropriate.