Court Opinion

ID: 9492310
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:37:50.421002+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:14.458206
License: Public Domain

RYAN, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent from the majority opinion, although I must do so separately because my fellow dissenters have said some things with which I cannot agree.
Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 3(c)(1)(C) explicitly and unambiguously requires that a notice of appeal “name the court to which the appeal is taken.” And, it is incontrovertibly settled that the rule is jurisdictional. See Torres v. Oakland Scavenger Co., 487 U.S. 312, 108 S.Ct. 2405, *559101 L.Ed.2d 285 (1988). So, if the rule announced in Torres means anything, it means that the failure to “name the court to which the appeal is taken” in the notice of appeal deprives the appellate court in which the appeal is filed of jurisdiction in the case.
Dillon did not, in his claim of appeal, state the name of the court to which the appeal was taken. Therefore, this court is without jurisdiction to entertain the appeal. In syllogism form, the proposition would go something like this:
Major premise: No appellate court has jurisdiction of an appeal in which the notice of appeal fails to name the court to which the appeal is taken.
Minor premise: But Dillon’s notice of appeal fails to name the court to which the appeal is taken.
Conclusion: Therefore, no appellate court has jurisdiction of Dillon’s appeal.
But the members of the majority dislike the idea that subrule (C), like (A) and (B), should be jurisdictional; some think the rule is unnecessarily harsh, unjustly restrictive, and ill-considered; others think we ought to ignore failure to comply with the rule because many lawyers have been ignoring it. And so the majority has today suspended the requirement of (C) that the notice of appeal must “name the court to which the appeal is taken” if it turns out that the flawed appeal is filed in the only court to which a proper appeal could properly have been taken. If the United States Supreme Court had not declared in Torres that compliance with all of Rule 3(c)(1) is jurisdictional, the majority’s strained effort to substitute its own rule for the plain English requirements of Congress’s rule might be defensible. But the Supreme Court has said that compliance with the rule is jurisdictional and, therefore, noncompliance with it must necessarily defeat jurisdiction.
This is not rocket science; it is plain English. We do not “apply” a rule that establishes a condition precedent to our exercise of jurisdiction by exercising jurisdiction despite noncompliance with the rule when in our judgment the condition precedent is burdensome, unwise, and ignored by some members of the bar. In doing that, we “misapply” the rule.
To the credit of the signors of the majority opinion, they do not claim that there was “substantial compliance” with the rule in this case or that Dillon’s notice of appeal contained some language somewhere that is the “functional equivalent” of naming the court to which his appeal was to be taken. My colleagues simply hold in a remarkable ipse dixit that compliance with subrule (C), albeit jurisdictional, may hereafter be ignored and excused in the vast majority of all appeals in this circuit; that is, appeals in which the defective appeal is taken to the proper court. That kind of “reasoning” is known in forums less august than this United States Court of Appeals as an “800-pound gorilla rule.” That is to say, even though this court has no authority whatever to excuse compliance with Rule 3(c)(1)(C), it nevertheless has the “power” to do so because more active judges on this court are willing to excuse noncompliance with the rule than are unwilling to do so.
This is not an attractive thing that the court does today. Not only does it make a hash of the venerable principle of judicial self-restraint, it also sends an unmistakable signal to the bench and bar that it is open season in Cincinnati on the rules of practice a majority of judges here might think excessively harsh, unnecessary, widely ignored in practice, or just plain “dumb.”
I would enforce the rule and, therefore, respectfully dissent.