Court Opinion

ID: 9579252
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 21:53:02.071969+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:33:41.274392
License: Public Domain

GORSUCH, J., Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I admire and agree with the court’s thoughtful treatment of the merits of this case. Before reaching the merits, however, I would dismiss this appeal for lack of jurisdiction. The Blauseys’s argument that we may entertain their appeal, even if ultimately to reject it, runs afoul of the Supreme Court’s directions about the respect due statutory limits on our jurisdiction and exacerbates a circuit split.
The Blauseys have not complied with unambiguous statutory preconditions to appeal. For an appeal, like this one, arising under 28 U.S.C. § 158(d)(2)(A), Congress has directed that “a petition requesting permission to appeal ... shall be filed with the circuit clerk not later than 10 days after the certification is entered on the docket sheet of the bankruptcy court,” and further directed that the petition for appeal “shall be taken in the manner prescribed in subdivisions (a)(1), (b), (c), and (d) of rule 5 of the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure.” 28 U.S.C. § 158 Note at § 4, 3 (emphasis added).1 Before us, the Blauseys concede that they did not file a petition requesting permission to appeal with the circuit clerk within 10 days, much less one conforming to the requirements of the specified subdivisions of Rule 5. That concession should end this appeal.
The Supreme Court’s discussion in Bowles v. Russell, 551 U.S. 205, 127 S.Ct. 2360, 168 L.Ed.2d 96 (2007), requires as much. There, the Court clarified that, because Congress is the branch of government constitutionally vested with the authority to regulate the jurisdiction of the federal courts, courts are powerless to enlarge statutory time limitations. Id. at 2365. When Congress “forbids federal courts from adjudicating an otherwise legitimate ‘class of cases’ after a certain period has elapsed from final judgment,” its decision is “no less ‘jurisdictional’ ” than when it confers or denies subject matter jurisdiction. Id. at 2366. The resulting jurisdictional hurdle is one that a court may not lower for the litigants — no matter how deserving the litigants and no matter how equitable their reason for seeking a delay may be. Id. Even aside from this *1135jurisdictional imperative, it is worth pausing to note that respecting Congress’s mandates about the nature and content of a Section 158 petition is not simply a matter of following “form for its esthetics”— instead, Congress’s mandates serve a substantive function, ensuring a petition whose contents are “designed to answer the question of whether an ... appeal will materially advance the ... litigation.” Aucoin v. Matador Services, Inc., 749 F.2d 1180, 1181 (5th Cir.1985) (Higginbotham, J.). A bare notice of appeal, like the one filed by the Blauseys, surely “expresses an appellant’s wish for such a ruling but it misfires in function because,” unlike a statutorily compliant petition, “it does not timely inform the appellate court in a manner which allows it promptly to respond.” Id.2
The Blauseys’s invocation of FRAP 2 does not solve the problem for two independently compelling reasons. First, by its terms, Rule 2 states that the “court of appeals may — to expedite its decision or for other good cause — suspend any provision of these rules in a particular case.” Fed.R.App.P. 2 (emphasis added). But in the statute before us Congress specifically incorporated select subdivisions of Rule 5 as preconditions for a valid petition, 28 U.S.C. § 158 Note at § 3, and whatever authority Rule 2 provides for overcoming rules, it does not imbue us with authority to suspend provisions of a statute. Surely we would not be willing to suspend the requirements of Rule 5 if Congress had copied them, word-for word, into the statute. The Blauseys offer us no apparent reason to treat our statute, in which Congress expressly incorporated various of Rule 5’s subdivisions by reference, any differently.
Second, even if Rule 2 did imbue us with authority to revise Congress’s statute, it still would not empower us to excuse the Blauseys’s procedural default. Rule 2 authorizes departures from the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure when “good cause” is shown, but Rule 26(b)(1) trumps Rule 2 when it comes to extensions of time, providing that we “may not extend the time to file ... a petition for permission to appeal.” Fed.R.App.P. 26(b)(1); see also Fed.R.App.P. 2 (“[A] court of appeals may ... suspend any provision of these rules ... except as otherwise provided in Rule 26(b).”). And an extension of time to file is functionally what the Blau-seys seek from us. The Blauseys ask us to treat their compliant petition, filed over three months after the statutory deadline, as if it had been filed within the statutory period, and do so on the ground that they filed a eoncededly non-compliant notice of appeal within that period. Every other circuit to have faced such a request has rejected it, however, recognizing that granting such a request would be the functional equivalent of affording an impermissible extension of time. As the Eleventh Circuit has explained in materially identical circumstances, granting such a request “would be too much of a stretch and would undermine both the purpose of Rule 5 and of the prohibition of Rule 26. A notice of appeal contains none of the ... components required by Rule 5(b)(1) and does not permit an answer from the opposing party as contemplated in Rule 5(b)(2).” Main Drug, Inc. v. Aetna U.S. Healthcare, Inc., 475 F.3d 1228, 1231 (11th Cir.2007).3
*1136Neither is this result simply a matter of common sense and widespread circuit law. In Torres v. Oakland Scavenger Co., 487 U.S. 312, 108 S.Ct. 2405, 101 L.Ed.2d 285 (1988), the Supreme Court held that Rule 2 did not permit the courts to correct a clerical error in a party’s notice of appeal by adding an accidentally forgotten party after the time for appeal elapsed. Using Rule 2 in this way, the Court held, would “vitiate[]” mandatory time limits: “[p]ermitting courts to exercise jurisdiction over unnamed parties after the time for filing a notice of appeal has passed is equivalent to permitting courts to extend the time for filing a notice of appeal. Because the Rules do not grant the courts the latter power, we hold that the Rules likewise withhold the former.” Id. at 315, 108 S.Ct. 2405. Exactly the same might be said here: employing Rule 2 in the manner urged by the Blauseys would vitiate the mandatory nature of the statute’s time limits and do so in defiance of Rule 26.
Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1309, AFL-CIO v. Laidlaw Transit Serv., Inc., 435 F.3d 1140 (9th Cir.2006), does not alter this result. In Amalgamated, this court excused compliance with Rule 5 only because the court had “construed the statute [the Class Action Fairness Act (“CAFA”) ] to require a procedural framework that is not readily apparent from the statutory text or its legislative history, and ha[d] changed the statutory deadline for seeking to appeal to the opposite of what the plain language of the statute says.” Id. at 1146. In these most unusual circumstances, the court excused compliance with Rule 5 “[t]o avoid the serious unfairness and potential due process violation that applying our holdings to this case might raise.” Id. at 1146-47. None of the unique considerations the Amalgamated court faced pertains to routine cases like this one where the appellant files a notice of appeal rather than the required Rule 5 petition. For starters, unlike in the CAFA context, Congress could not have been clearer in 28 U.S.C. § 158 Note that Rule 5 applies to any Section 158 petition for permission to appeal. Next, the time-limitation set forth in the statute has not been modified by the court. Finally, the Blau-seys provide us with no reason whatsoever to explain their failure to comply with Rule 5 — let alone anything approaching good cause. As they would have it, any timely filed notice of appeal will substitute for a Rule 5-compliant petition. See also 16A Charles Alan Wright, Arthur R. Miller & Edward H. Cooper, Federal Practice and Procedure § 3951 (4th ed.2008) (explaining that “[t]he approach of treating the notice of appeal as a petition for permission to appeal [in Amalgamated ] ... is one that has been rejected by other courts in other contexts and that litigants should not count upon in future cases”).
The court seeks to narrow the scope of its ruling by stressing its view that the Blauseys have met Rule 2’s “good cause” requirement because “our court[] docket[ed] ... the appeal.” Maj. Op. at 1130-31. But the Blauseys themselves make no argument along these lines — and for good reason. The decision of the clerk’s office or a motions panel to accept this appeal has no bearing on the cause of the Blau-seys’s failure to comply with Section 158. Neither, of course, do the decisions of the clerk’s office or a motions panel excuse us from considering independently our authority to hear a case, especially where (as here) that authority has been challenged. Indeed, it is long settled that a decision of *1137a motions panel does not control a subsequent merits panel or absolve us of the need to assess our authority to proceed. See Morrison-Knudsen Co., Inc. v. CHG Int’l, Inc., 811 F.2d 1209, 1214 (9th Cir.1987) (“A motions panel of this court previously ruled that we had jurisdiction here.... We cannot agree, however, and are bound to note a defect in appellate jurisdiction whenever one appears.”), cert, dismissed sub nom. Federal Sav. & Loan Ins. Corp. v. Stevenson Assoc., 488 U.S. 935, 109 S.Ct. 358, 102 L.Ed.2d 349 (1988). The court’s reluctance to shift the course of this appeal is understandable, and yet under its rule an appellant who files a notice of appeal in the statutory period, rather than a Rule 5-compliant petition, is not procedurally barred from a hearing. Bowles does not authorize this result. Nor does Rule 2 allow it. The problem the Supreme Court and our sister circuits have foreseen has materialized here: a mandatory limit has been effectively “vitiated.”
I respectfully dissent.

. The majority agrees, and neither parly contests, that the temporary procedural requirements set forth in Pub.L. No. 109-8 § 1233(b), codified as 28 U.S.C. § 158 Note, carry the full force of statute. See 1 U.S.C. § 112 (statutes at large “shall be legal evidence of laws ... in all the courts of the United States”); United States Nat’l Bank of Oregon v. Indep. Ins. Agents of Am. Inc., 508 U.S. 439, 448, 113 S.Ct. 2173, 124 L.Ed.2d 402 (1993).

. See also Aparicio v. Swan Lake, 643 F.2d 1109, 1112 (5th Cir.1981) (stating, in the context of 28 U.S.C. § 1292 interlocutory appeals, that Rule 5's "ten-day limitation period functions largely to assure that the district court will exercise its discretion to certify an appeal ... contemporaneously with this court's discretionary grant of permission to proceed with the interlocutory appeal”) (citing 9 Moore's Federal Practice P 205.03(2), at 5-9 (2d ed.1980)).

. See also Crystal Clear Comm. v. Southwestern Bell, 415 F.3d 1171, 1175 (10th Cir.2005); Inmates of the Allegheny County Jail v. Wecht, 873 F.2d 55, 57 (3rd Cir.1989); Aucoin, 749 *1136F.2d at 1181; In re La Providencia Dev. Corp., 515 F.2d 94, 95-96 (1st Cir.1975); Hanson v. Hunt Oil Co., 488 F.2d 70, 71-72 (8th Cir.1973); 16A Charles Alan Wright, Arthur R. Miller & Edward H. Cooper, Federal Practice and Procedure § 3951 (4th ed.2008) (noting this widespread agreement among circuits).