Court Opinion

ID: 9484261
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:46:15.576404+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:50:07.585791
License: Public Domain

DAVID A. NELSON, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
I concur in the panel’s disposition of the appeal of plaintiff Craig Francis and in the panel’s treatment of the trial court’s denial of the defendant’s motion for judgment n.o.v. I respectfully dissent, however, from the panel’s conclusion that jurisdiction is lacking over the appeal of plaintiff Lisa Francis.
Craig and Lisa Francis are husband and wife. Both of them joined as plaintiffs in this action, Mr. Francis seeking damages for personal injuries and Mrs. Francis seeking damages for loss of consortium. The Francis I jury found the husband’s damages to be $394,000 and the wife’s damages to be $25,-000.
After the trial court entered judgment for the defendant in Francis II, counsel for Mr. and Mrs. Francis filed a notice of appeal on behalf of “Plaintiffs.” The plural form of the noun was used both in the body of the notice (“Notice is given that Plaintiffs hereby appeal ... ”) and in the signature block, which identified the signator as “Attorney For Plaintiffs ”. (Emphasis supplied.)
On the strength of Minority Employees v. Tennessee Dept. of Employment Sec., 901 F.2d 1327 (6th Cir.), cert. denied, 498 U.S. 878, 111 S.Ct. 210, 112 L.Ed.2d 170 (1990), my colleagues on the panel conclude that the notice was not sufficient to designate Mrs. Francis as an appellant. In Minority Employees, however, there were four plaintiffs— a corporation and three individuals — and it was arguably unclear which of the four wanted to appeal. Judge Guy, whose vote was decisive (see Minority Employees, 901 F.2d at 1340, n. 1, Guy, J., concurring), explained in his separate concurrence that he thought the notice of appeal filed on behalf of the “plaintiffs” could have been designed to specify the corporate plaintiff only, because collective nouns are sometimes treated as plural. In the case at bar, however, only the defendant — Clark Equipment Co. — has such a name. The name of Craig Francis is unequivocally singular, and so is that of Lisa Francis. Craig and Lisa Francis are the only plaintiffs in the case, of course, and on these facts one wonders how a notice of appeal filed by “Plaintiffs,” in the plural number, could possibly be thought to have *557been filed on behalf of one of the plaintiffs but not the other.1
It is true that Minority Employees appears to hold that “appellants must include in the notice of appeal the name of each and every party taking the appeal.” Id. at 1330. Minority Employees also acknowledged, however, that “there may be some departures from naming in the body of the notice that will not be found to be fatal.” Id. at 1335. Citing the latter passage, a subsequent published decision of this court holds that it is possible for multiple plaintiffs to be specified as appellants without their actual names being set forth anywhere in the notice of appeal. See Adkins v. United Mineworkers of America, 941 F.2d 392, 396-98 (6th Cir.1991), cert. denied, - U.S. -, 112 S.Ct. 1180, 117 L.Ed.2d 424 (1992).
The plaintiffs in Adkins numbered in the hundreds. Id. at 394. They filed a notice of appeal specifying as appellants “all of the Plaintiffs to this action as set out in the Complaint which has been filed herein as well as in all amendments thereto.” Id. at 396. Notwithstanding that the plaintiffs were not individually named anywhere in the notice of appeal, the Adkins panel concluded, by a vote of 2 to 1, that “we have jurisdiction over all plaintiffs who pursued the complaint in the district court to final judgment.” Id. at 398.2
The Adkins majority pointed out that the plaintiffs in Minority Employees “had failed ... to designate all the plaintiffs,” and the Adkins majority noted that “[t]he majority in Minority Employees emphasized that ‘the use of the term “plaintiffs” in the body of the notice failed to designate the individual plaintiffs.”’ Id. at 398, n. 6, quoting Minority Employees, 901 F.2d at 1322. The notice of appeal in Adkins was absolutely unequivocal, by contrast, and the Adkins panel held that the words “all of the Plaintiffs” meant what they said notwithstanding the lack of individual naming.
Because Craig and Lisa Francis are the only plaintiffs in the case at bar, the reference to “Plaintiffs” in the notice of appeal filed in this case can only be a reference to the two of them. The notice of appeal before us here is every bit as unequivocal as the notice of appeal in Adkins was. If Adkins was decided correctly, therefore, it seems to me that we necessarily have jurisdiction over both plaintiffs in the instant case.

. The fact that there are only two plaintiffs distinguishes the instant case from Van Hoose v. Eidson, 450 F.2d 746 (6th Cir.1971), where there were four plaintiffs. The title of that case, as set forth in the caption of the notice of appeal, identified the plaintiffs only as “Floyd Van Hoose, et al, Plaintiffs-Appellants.” This court said that "[tjhe term 'et al' does not inform any other party or any court as to which of the plaintiffs desire to appeal,” suggesting that those desiring to appeal might have been more than one of the plaintiffs but fewer than all of them. Van Hoose, 450 F.2d at 747 (emphasis supplied). No such ambiguity is present in the case at bar, where there are only two parties plaintiff and "Plaintiffs” can only be a reference to both of them.

. Judge KTupansky filed a strong dissent in Adkins, expressing an understanding of the majority opinion in Minority Employees comparable to the understanding I entertained prior to the decision in Adkins. See, e.g., Sheet Metal Workers Int'l Assn. v. Dane Sheet Metal, Inc., 932 F.2d 578, 581 n. 3 (6th Cir.1991) (opinion by Nelson, J.). As one who dissented in Minority Employees, however, I acknowledge that I may not have as good an understanding of the logic of that decision as do those judges who joined in the majority opinion. While Judge Krupansky was among that number, so was the author of the majority opinion in Adkins, Judge Wellford. The result reached in Adkins is one that would have been compelled by the language of the Federal Rules, in my view, were it not for Minority Employees; I am therefore inclined to defer to Judge Well-ford’s understanding of what the Minority Employees majority actually had in mind.