Court Opinion

ID: 9421319
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:57:49.546644+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:29.688318
License: Public Domain

*439Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
whom Mr. Justice Harlan joins,
concurring in No. 34 and dissenting in No. 76.
The result in these two litigations of course has significance for the parties. That is, however, of relative insignificance compared to the directions which judges in the district courts and courts of appeals will draw from the Court’s opinions. For me, what is said has not a little kinship with the pronouncements of the Delphic oracle.
The opinion in Cold Metal Process Co. v. United Engineering & Foundry Co., post, p. 445, declares that 28 U. S. C. § 1291 remains unimpaired, but surely that section does not remain what it was before these opinions were written. Rule 54 (b) is apparently the transforming cause. The Court could have said that Rule 54 (b), promulgated under congressional authority and having the force of statute, has qualified 28 U. S. C. § 1291. It does not say so. The Court could have said that it rejects the reasoning of the decisions in which this Court for over a century has interpreted § 1291 as expressing a hostility toward piecemeal appeals. It does not say so. The Court could have said that Rule 54 (b)’s requirement of a certificate from a district judge means that the district judges alone determine the content of finality. The Court does not say that either.
The Court does indicate that what has been the core of the doctrine of finality as applied to multiple claims litigation — that only that part of a litigation which is separate from, and independent of, the remainder of the litigation can be appealed before the completion of the entire litigation — is no longer to be applied as a standard, or at least as an exclusive standard, for deciding what is final for purposes of § 1291. The Court does not, however, indicate what standards the district courts and the courts of appeals are now to apply in determining when a decision is final. It leaves this problem in the first *440instance to the district courts, subject to review by the courts of appeals for an abuse of discretion. In other instances where a district court’s ruling can be upset only for an abuse of its discretion, the scope of review is necessarily narrow. Here, in regard to the present problem, what is to come under review is a newly modified requirement of finality. But the requirement continues to be based upon a statute, viz., 28 U. S. C. § 1291, and that statute defines and constricts the jurisdiction of the courts of appeals. Therefore the issue of compliance with this congressional command would, I should suppose, cast upon the courts of appeals a duty of independent judgment broader than is implied by the usual flavor of the phrase “abuse of discretion.”
For me, the propositions emerging from analysis of the relationship of Rule 54 (b) to 28 U. S. C. § 1291 are clear.
1. 28 U. S. C. § 1291 is left intact by Rule 54 (b). It could not be otherwise with due regard for the congressional policy embodied in that section and in view of what the Advisory Committee on the Rules said in its Note to amended Rule 54 (b):
“The historic rule in the federal courts has always prohibited piecemeal disposal of litigation and permitted appeals only from final judgments except in those special instances covered by statute. . . . Rule 54 (b) was originally adopted in view of the wide scope and possible content of the newly created ‘civil action’ in order to avoid the possible injustice of a delay in judgment of a distinctly separate claim to await adjudication of the entire case. It was not designed to overturn the settled federal rule stated above ....
“. . . After extended consideration, it [the Committee] concluded that a retention of the older fed*441eral rule was desirable, and that this rule needed only the exercise of a discretionary power to afford a remedy in the infrequent harsh case to provide a simple, definite, workable rule. This is afforded by amended Rule 54 (b). It re-establishes an ancient policy with clarity and precision. . . .” Report of Advisory Committee on Proposed Amendments to Rules of Civil Procedure 70-72.
2. 28 U. S. C. § 1291 is not a technical rule in a game. It expresses not only a deeply rooted but a wisely sanctioned principle against piecemeal appeals governing litigation in the federal courts. See Cobbledick v. United States, 309 U. S. 323; Radio Station WOW v. Johnson, 326 U. S. 120, 123-127. The great importance of this characteristic feature of the federal judicial system — its importance in administering justice — is made luminously manifest by considering the evils where, as in New York, piecemeal reviews are allowed.
3. While the principle against piecemeal appeals has been compendiously and therefore, at times, loosely phrased as implying that the whole of a litigation, no matter what its nature, must be completed before any appeal is allowed, see Collins v. Miller, 252 U. S. 364, 370, the underlying rationale of the principle has been respected when not susceptible of this mechanical way of putting it. What have been called exceptions are not exceptions at all in the sense of inroads on the principle. They have not qualified the core, that is, that there should be no premature, intermediate appeal.
Thus the Court has permitted appeal before completion of the whole litigation when failure to do so would preclude any effective review or would result in irreparable injury. See Forgay v. Conrad, 6 How. 201; Cohen v. Beneficial Loan Corp., 337 U. S. 541, 545-547; Swift & Co. v. Compania Caribe, 339 U. S. 684, 688-689. A *442second situation in which the Court has found that an appeal before termination of the entire litigation did not conflict with the congressional policy against piecemeal appeals is that in which a party to the completed portion of the litigation has no interest in the rest of the proceedings and to make him await their outcome would merely cause unfairness. See Williams v. Morgan, 111 U. S. 684, 699; United States v. River Rouge Co., 269 U. S. 411, 413-414.
4. The expansion by the Federal Rules of the allowable content of a proceeding and the range of a litigation inevitably enlarged the occasions for severing one aspect or portion of a litigation from what remains under the traditional test of a “final decision.” On the basis of prior cases, we held that it was not a departure from the policy against piecemeal appeals to permit an appeal with respect to that part of a multiple claims litigation based on a set of facts separate and independent from the facts on which the remainder of the litigation was based. Reeves v. Beardall, 316 U. S. 283. The Note of the Advisory Committee, quoted supra, demonstrates that the amended Rule 54 (b) was designed in accordance with the historic policy against premature appeal and with the decisions of this Court allowing appeal from a “judgment of a distinctly separate claim.” What the Rule did introduce, however, was a discretionary power in the district judge to control appealability by preventing a party from even attempting to appeal a severable part of a litigation unless the district judge has expressly certified that there is no just reason for delay and has expressly directed entry of judgment on that phase of the litigation. This provision was directed to the kind of difficulty encountered in Dickinson v. Petroleum Conversion Corp., 338 U. S. 507, in ascertaining whether the district judge is in fact finished with a separable part of the litigation.
*443The Court casually disregards this long history of § 1291 and the bearing of Rule 54 (b) to it by rejecting the separate-and-independent test as the basis for determining the finality of a part of a multiple claims litigation. The Court says that its decision “does not impair the statutory concept of finality embraced in § 1291.” The Court may not do so in words, for it pays lip-service to § 1291. But that section’s function as a brake against piecemeal appeals in future multiple claims litigation is greatly impaired. Encouragement is abundantly given to parties to seek such appeals.
The principles which this Court has heretofore enunciated over a long course of decisions under § 1291 furnish ready guides for deciding the appealability of the certified parts of the litigation in the two cases now before the Court. Count II in Sears, Roebuck & Co. v. Mackey, ante, p. 427, is appealable since the transactions and occurrences involved in it do not involve any of those embraced in Counts III and IV. Count I involves at least two transactions which are also the subject matter of Counts III and IV, but is appealable under § 1292 (1) as an interlocutory order denying an injunction. In Cold Metal Process Co. v. United Engineering & Foundry Co., post, p. 445, the counterclaim, even if not compulsory, is based in substantial part on the transactions involved in the main litigation and hence not appealable.
5. Of course, as the Court’s opinion appears to recognize, that crucial principle of the doctrine of finality that the court of appeals has no jurisdiction unless there is a “final decision” cannot be left to the district court. It is one thing for a district court to determine whether it is or is not through with a portion of a litigation. It is quite another thing for it to determine whether the requirements of § 1291 are satisfied so as to give jurisdiction to the court of appeals. A district court can no more confer *444jurisdiction on a court of appeals outside the limits of 28 U. S. C. § 1291 than a state supreme court can confer jurisdiction on this Court beyond the bounds of 28 U. S. C. § 1257. In a particular litigation the opinion of the district judge may properly be deemed a valuable guide. But flexibility would be a strange name for authority in the district court to command the court of appeals to exercise jurisdiction.
6. In summary, then, the Court rightly states, even if it does not hold, that § 1291 is unimpaired by Rule 54 (b). Section 1291 is what a long course of decision has construed it to be. The unifying principle of decisions for over a century is observance of hostility in the federal judicial system to piecemeal appellate review (with a few strictly defined exceptions not here relevant, see 28 U. S. C. § 1292) of one litigation, no matter how many phases or parts there may be to a single judicial proceeding, so long as no part has become separated from, and independent of, the others. This rooted principle against piecemeal appeals of an organic whole — the core of § 1291 — is not left unimpaired when its enforcement is committed without guidance to the individualized notions about finality of some two hundred and fifty district judges, themselves accountable to the discordant views of eleven essentially independent courts of appeals. Allowing such leeway to the district courts and courts of appeals is not flexibility but anarchy.