Court Opinion

ID: 9733985
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 17:22:15.375098+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:26:44.969605
License: Public Domain

TERRY, Associate Judge,
with whom Chief Judge PRYOR and Associate Judges NEWMAN and ROGERS join, dissenting in part:
I believe that the time has come for this court to overrule its holding in Frost v. Peoples Drug Store, Inc., 327 A.2d 810, 812-813 (D.C.1974), that denials of forum non conveniens motions are immediately appealable as “final orders [or] judgments” within the meaning of D.C.Code § 11-721 (1981). In Frost we applied the rule of Cohen v. Beneficial Industrial Loan Corp., 337 U.S. 541, 69 S.Ct. 1221, 93 L.Ed. 1528 (1949), in which the Supreme Court held final and appealable a trial court’s refusal to require plaintiffs to post security. The Court held in Cohen that the trial court’s decision fell into “that small class which finally determine claims of right separable from, and collateral to, rights asserted in the action, too important to be denied review, and too independent of the cause itself to require that appellate consideration be deferred until the whole ease is adjudicated.” Id. at 546, 69 S.Ct. at 1225 (emphasis added). Our reported decisions since Frost make plain that the “claims of right” in cases such as this are not too important to be denied immediate review; rather, they have generally been trivial claims which warrant neither our immediate scrutiny nor a lengthy interruption in the trial proceedings. Research discloses that in only one case since Frost has this court reversed the denial of a forum non conveniens motion: District-Realty Title Insurance Corp. v. Goodrich, 328 A.2d 93 (D.C.1974). To the extent that the denial of such a motion is reversible error, the error is surely remediable on appeal after a final judgment, just as the denial of a motion to dismiss on any other ground (e.g., lack of personal or subject-matter jurisdiction) is remediable.
The court’s experience over the last thirteen years convinces me that we should overrule Frost. The fact that we have affirmed the order under review in every Frost -type appeal except one since Frost was decided demonstrates compellingly that the issues presented in such appeals do not meet the second part of the three-part test enunciated in Cohen: “too important to be denied review.” I regret that a majority of my colleagues have not reached the same conclusion. I fear they have fallen prey to the temptation of which the Third Circuit wrote in Bachowski v. Usery, 545 F.2d 363 (3d Cir.1976):
[I]t would seem to us to be a disservice to the Court, to litigants in general and to the idea of speedy justice if we were to succumb to enticing suggestions to abandon the deeply-held distaste for piecemeal litigation in every instance of temptation. Moreover, to find appeala-bility in those close cases where the merits of the dispute may attract the deep interest of the court would lead, eventually, to a lack of principled adjudication or perhaps the ultimate devitalization of the finality rule as enacted by Congress.
Id. at 373-374, quoted with approval in Richardson-Merrell, Inc. v. Roller, 472 U.S. 424, 440, 105 S.Ct. 2757, 2766, 86 L.Ed. 2d 340 (1985). In this era of judicial overload, I lament the fact that the court has not seen fit to eliminate from its docket a class of cases that should never have found their way there in the first place.
I respectfully dissent.