Court Opinion

ID: 9487046
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:06:53.37822+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:52:04.230499
License: Public Domain

ROVNER, Circuit Judge,
with whom CUDAHY, Circuit Judge, joins, concurring in the judgment.
Although I am convinced that we should accept jurisdiction over this appeal and that the district court did not abuse its discretion in dismissing Otis’ case, I write separately to address two aspects of the court’s opinion with which I cannot agree. First, I believe the court’s discussion of the allegedly conflicting lines of authority in this circuit exaggerates the extent of any differences in orn-eases. And second, I am uncomfortable with the court’s comments on the practice of dismissing eases with leave to reinstate in the Northern District of Illinois.
A.
I am less sanguine than the majority that our existing cases can so easily be assigned to distinct and competing camps. (See ante at 1163-1164.) In my view, our cases are in large measure consistent, and absent the changes we adopt today, those cases would indicate that we have no jurisdiction over this appeal. In Hatch v. Lane, 854 F.2d 981 (7th Cir.1988), for example, the case most factually similar to this one, the district court dismissed the plaintiffs complaint without prejudice to the filing of an amended complaint within thirty days. As in the present case, the court’s conditional dismissal order did not specify that it would ripen into a final judgment at the conclusion of the thirty-day period. We therefore held that the passage of that period “did not ... convert the district court’s nonfinal decision into a final order.” Id. at 982. Moreover, we indicated that because the requisites of Rule 58 had not been met, “no final appealable order [was] before th[e] court.” Id. Instead of merely providing a time limit for the filing of an amended complaint, we explained that the district court should have taken an important additional step — it should have instructed the clerk in its conditional order to enter a Rule 58 judgment if the plaintiff failed to file an amended complaint within thirty days. Id.; see also Grantham v. McGraw-Edison Co., 444 F.2d 210, 212 (7th Cir.1971) (order dismissing with leave to reinstate not a final order as it did not terminate the litigation on the merits).
On the heels of Hatch came Harris v. Milwaukee County Circuit Court, 886 F.2d 982 (7th Cir.1989). The majority sees some tension between Hatch and Harris, as it assigns those cases to competing camps. But Hatch and Harris are easily reconciled; indeed, Judge Posner’s opinion in Harris distinguished the language of the dismissal order there from the order we had considered in Hatch. The Harris order provided the plaintiff twenty days to pay the required filing fee, and “[i]f this deadline passes without the filing fee [being] paid, this order will ripen into a final judgment of dismissal without further order.” 886 F.2d at 983. Harris held that this dismissal became an appealable final judgment by its own terms at the expiration of the twenty-day period. Id. at 984. Yet Harris made clear that:
[t]he form of order used in this case should be distinguished from that held not to create an appealable judgment in Hatch v. Lane, 854 F.2d 981, 981-82 (7th Cir.1988).... An order that simply dismisses a case with leave to replead is not a final judgment, because it does not end the litigation. It is true that the form of order in Hatch implied that if the plaintiff did not file a particular type of amended complaint within thirty days, the case would be over. But there was no direction to that effect, and we thought that in such a case a final judgment order should be required. Here the district judge stated that his order would become a final judgment on a specified date unless a specified contingen-*1171ey occurred, and the contingency did not occur so the order became a final judgment on the specified date according to its terms. This was an unorthodox but not an improper method of complying with Rule 58’s requirement of a separate judgment order, although an explicit final judgment order would have been better. The order in Hatch was more oblique, and crossed the line.
Id. (citation omitted, emphasis added). The dichotomy that emerges from Hatch and Harris emphasizes the terms of the particular dismissal order at issue, and in particular, whether the order notifies the parties that the case will end automatically when the reinstatement period expires. We followed that dichotomy consistently in subsequent cases, and until today, it remained the law of this circuit. See Strasburg v. State Bar of Wisconsin, 1 F.3d 468, 472-73 (7th Cir.1993) (district court’s conditional dismissal order “made clear that additional action to dispose of the case was still necessary”), cert. denied, — U.S. -, 114 S.Ct. 698, 126 L.Ed.2d 665 (1994); Schoenberger v. Oselka, 909 F.2d 1086 (7th Cir.1990) (court had jurisdiction over appeal from a Harris-type order); In re Behrens, 900 F.2d 97, 100-01 (7th Cir.1990) (applying Hatch/Harris distinction to order of the bankruptcy court).
The majority observes, however, that we at times have entertained appeals even where a conditional dismissal order had not mentioned a final judgment, thereby implying that we have been less than faithful to Hatch. (Ante at 1164 (citing Kaplan v. Zenner, 956 F.2d 149, 150 n. 1 (7th Cir.1992); Adams v. Lever Bros. Co., 874 F.2d 393, 394-95 (7th Cir.1989)). Yet in my view, neither Adams nor Kaplan diverges from Hatch. In Adams, the district court entered a further order denying reinstatement at the end of the period permitted by its dismissal order.1 The court’s supplemental order plainly indicated that the court intended to finally dispose of all matters in the case, making the order an appealable final decision. The district court’s supplemental order in Adams therefore removes that case from either branch of the Hatch/Harris dichotomy. Kaplan also is of limited value because the opinion fails to disclose the nature of the district court’s conditional dismissal order, stating only that the court dismissed the case “with leave to reinstate on or before July 26.” 956 F.2d at 150. As a result, we are in the dark as to whether Kaplan involved a Hatch or Harris-type order, meaning that Kaplan cannot be read to create a conflict in orn-eases.
Were we to adhere to Hatch and Harris today, there is no doubt in my mind that we would refuse jurisdiction over this appeal, as the district court’s July 11, 1991 order is clearly of the Hatch rather than the Harris variety. The district court effectively dismissed Otis’ ease without prejudice, and its order did not state that the conditional dismissal would be converted into a dismissal with prejudice at the end of the reinstatement period. The court’s decision to accept jurisdiction over this appeal therefore represents a clean break from our existing precedents, although it is a break with which I agree. Judge Easterbrook’s opinion quite rightly explains that our jurisdiction should not depend on whether the district court invoked the “magic words” of finality in its conditional order when it is otherwise clear that the court intended no further proceedings in the case. (Ante at 1165-66.) I therefore concur in the decision to abandon Hatch and its progeny, although I do so recognizing that following those decisions would have required a different result today.
B.
I also am compelled to comment on the court’s discussion of the practice of dismissing cases with leave to reinstate. The majority begins by telling us that the practice is rarely used outside the Northern District of Illinois (ante at 1162), but that is simply not the case, as there are any number of decisions from other circuits that address the implications of such orders on appellate jurisdiction. (See ante at 1164-65 (discussing case law from other circuits)). As a former district judge who utilized similar orders, I take exception to the implication that the *1172practice is used most frequently for the sole purpose of improving a court’s statistics. I fully agree that it would be improper for a district court to dismiss a case with leave to reinstate simply to reduce the size of its docket, although congressionally-imposed time restrictions may only serve to make that avenue more attractive to district judges. But in my view, careful and deliberative judges in the Northern District of Illinois, such as Judge Hárt, put the practice to a number of more worthy uses.
For example, in the case before us today, Judge Hart surely was unconcerned with docket statistics when he provided the plaintiff an opportunity to reinstate her case in six months if her discovery obligations were belatedly fulfilled. As the majority explains, Judge Hart was entitled to dismiss the case outright on July 11, 1991 (or perhaps even before that (see ante at 1168)), and in my view, he should not be faulted for displaying compassion for a pro se litigant by providing her six additional months to complete her discovery and to reinstate her ease. The majority responds that the district court could just as easily have announced on July 11,1991 that it intended to dismiss Otis’ case in six months if she remained unable or unwilling to proceed. (See ante at 1163.) But as the majority concedes, that would have required the court to set an additional status hearing for January 12, 1992, and on that date, to revisit the case yet again. The majority’s proposal would therefore require district courts, whose scarce resources already are overextended, to expend even more time on cases that are going nowhere, not to mention the additional expense and inconvenience to the parties of further hearings. Furthermore, if the case happened to be over three years old when the district court made the preliminary announcement the majority proposes (which was not the case here), the court would have been required to explain in a published report why the case had not yet been resolved. See 28 U.S.C. § 476(a)(3). Because a district court has only limited time to devote to each of its hundreds of eases, and because it generally is perceived (whether correctly or incorrectly) as something of a stigma to have cases included on such a published report, the majority’s proposal may make district courts even less willing to offer plaintiffs in Otis’ position similar opportunities in the future. Of course, the district court avoids all of these problems by dismissing the case with leave to reinstate. At the same time, after today’s decision, the court’s conditional order in all likelihood would not create new problems with jurisdiction on appeal.
I also found as a district judge that the practice of dismissing with leave to reinstate is particularly useful in the settlement context. For example, it can serve a legitimate purpose where settlement is imminent, or where the parties have decided to settle but need considerable time to finalize the terms of their agreement. Indeed, parties engaged in serious settlement negotiations often request a dismissal with leave to reinstate in order to maintain constructive pressure on the bargaining process while avoiding the time and expense of ongoing litigation responsibilities. A district judge might also use the device herself to insure that parties who purport to be on the verge of settlement finalize their agreement promptly. Use of the practice in the settlement context is eminently reasonable for a court with literally hundreds of civil and criminal cases on its docket, especially where any number of those cases may be on the verge of settlement at any one time. The alternative — permitting a case to languish on its docket while the court waits to hear from the parties — presents problems of its own, as that is one sure way for cases to fall through the cracks for months at a time. The only way to prevent that is to require periodic status reports, which again put parties on the verge of settlement to an unnecessary inconvenience and expense, particularly when one or both are from outside the district.
In the current judicial climate, where con-gressionally-imposed time constraints on the civil docket compete with the Speedy Trial Act restrictions of the criminal docket, we should not be so quick to condemn a practice that has proved useful to our district court colleagues simply because it may, in a few isolated instances, create jurisdictional questions on appeal. Given the degree of docket congestion in the Northern District of lili-*1173nois, I think it incumbent upon us, as a responsible and responsive reviewing court, to provide our colleagues with all reasonable means of efficiently and intelligently managing their case loads. In this case, Judge Hart chose a path that was both practical and compassionate — he removed the case from his docket while at the same time providing a recalcitrant pro se litigant a second chance to play by the rules. I, in all likelihood, would have chosen the same course were I sitting in his place.

. I am all too familiar with the facts in Adams, as I was the district judge below.