Court Opinion

ID: 9478249
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 06:44:07.084942+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:46:19.320082
License: Public Domain

SLOVITER, Circuit Judge,
concurring and dissenting.
I agree with the majority that the-district court’s order remanding the government’s action to the FmHA to require it to comply with the notice requirements under Pennsylvania law is an appealable order. See AJA Assocs. v. Army Corps of Engineers, 817 F.2d 1070, 1073 (3d Cir.1987). I also agree fully with its disposition of the government’s appeal. Thus I join in the introduction, Part IA and Part II of the majority’s opinion, and in its judgment reversing the court’s order.
I dissent from the majority’s assumption of jurisdiction over the portion of the district court’s order that denied Rivera’s motion for summary judgment. Our precedent makes clear that Rivera’s appeal from the denial of summary judgment in her favor is an appeal from a nonfinal and nonappealable order. I fear that the majority’s decision to yield to expediency in this case and its adoption of a discretionary standard of appellate jurisdiction over collateral matters will be improvident in the long run, consigning this court to a plethora of disputations over where the line should be drawn in future appeals.
In this court’s in banc decision in Kershner v. Mazurkiewicz, 670 F.2d 440 (3d Cir.1982), we canvassed the different positions taken in our prior cases and in other circuits on the doctrine of pendent appellate jurisdiction, and we opted for a circumscribed rather than broad approach to such jurisdiction. We held that the doctrine of pendent jurisdiction did not apply where two issues arising from a lower court order were “separate and distinct,” rather than “ ‘inextricably bound.’ ” Id. at 450 (quoting C. Wright, Law of Federal Courts § 102, at 513 (3d ed. 1976)). We held we had jurisdiction over the otherwise unre-viewable portion of a district court order only if we could not properly decide the reviewable portion of the order without reference to the unreviewable issues. Id. at 449. If the reviewable portion of the order could be disposed of without venturing into unreviewable matters, this court’s “jurisdiction should be limited accordingly,” id.; thus, “a mere nexus between the two orders is not sufficient to justify a *293decision to assume 449-50; see also NLRB v. Interstate Dress Carriers, Inc., 610 F.2d 99, 104 (3d Cir.1979) (declining to review discovery order granted in conjunction with preliminary injunction).
Applying these principles in Kershner, we held that although we had jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1292(a)(1) of an appeal by prison inmates from the district court’s denial of their motion for a preliminary injunction in a section 1983 suit, we lacked jurisdiction to consider the inmates’ appeal from that portion of the district court’s order that denied them class certification.
The majority attempts to distinguish Kershner from the instant case on the ground that the appeal in Kershner was in the preliminary injunction context, and therefore opportunity for appellate review would be ultimately provided. However, here as well the opportunity for appellate review is not foreclosed if we refrain at this stage from accepting jurisdiction over the denial of Rivera’s summary judgment motion; if we do not reach Rivera’s issues now, the majority concedes, “Ms. Rivera will again appeal.” Maj. op. at 288.
Moreover, the majority’s limitation of Kershner to the preliminary injunction context overlooks the important policy considerations that underlay that decision and that are equally applicable here. In Kersh-ner, we emphasized that provisions for interlocutory appeal in section 1292 constituted exceptions “from the basic rule that interlocutory orders are not appealable,” 670 F.2d at 448, and we stated that the scope of such exceptions must be construed with “great care and circumspection ... 'lest a floodgate be opened’ ” bringing in many otherwise unreviewable nonfinal orders. Id. at 447 (quoting Switzerland Cheese Assoc. v. E. Horne’s Market, Inc., 385 U.S. 23, 24, 87 S.Ct. 193, 195, 17 L.Ed.2d 123 (1966)).
In any event, this court has not viewed Kershner as necessarily confined to the preliminary injunction context. See Miller v. Bolger, 802 F.2d 660, 667 n. 7 (3d Cir.1986) (suggesting that the Kershner analysis requiring the issues to be “inextricably an locutory appeal under 28 U.S.C. § 1292(b)).
Finally, I cannot agree with the majority’s assertion that this situation is akin to Johnson v. Alldredge, 488 F.2d 820 (3d Cir.1973), cert. denied, 419 U.S. 882, 95 S.Ct. 148, 42 L.Ed.2d 122 (1974). Even if Johnson were more expansive than Kersh-ner, and it is not, Kershner, as the later in banc decision, would control. In Johnson, which involved an appeal certified under 28 U.S.C. § 1292(b), we held we were not limited to the inartful wording of the controlling question in the district court’s certification order. Id. at 822-23. We did not expand the appeal beyond the legal issue involved in the order appropriately before us there.
I am concerned that the majority’s decision in this case takes a step towards opening the floodgates we sought to keep closed in Kershner. The issues in the government’s appeal and Rivera’s appeal are not “inextricably intertwined,” as required under Kershner. That they are distinct is demonstrated by the independent treatment given them in the majority’s opinion. See Tustin v. Heckler, 749 F.2d 1055, 1065-66 (3d Cir.1984) (Kershner bars court from reviewing class certification order along with preliminary injunction, even though court would like to do so, because court lacks jurisdiction when issues are “entirely separate”); W.L. Gore & Assocs. v. Carlisle Corp., 529 F.2d 614, 618 (3d Cir.1976) (“jurisdiction conferred upon the court of appeals does not extend to other claims or issues determined by the judgment which have no bearing upon the propriety of the action of the court with respect to the [reviewable issue]”).
The cases from other circuits on which the majority relies may take a more liberal approach toward assertion of pendent appellate jurisdiction than we adopted in Kershner. In any event, they are distinguishable from this case because they appear to hold only that where extensive overlap exists in the issues and facts relevant to reviewable and unreviewable portions of a lower court decision, an appellate *294court may exercise discretion to consider otherwise unreviewable issues,
In San Filippo v. United States Trust Co., 737 F.2d 246 (2d Cir.1984), cert. denied, 470 U.S. 1085, 105 S.Ct. 1408, 84 L.Ed.2d 797 (1985), the court first found that it had jurisdiction under the collateral order doctrine to review the district court’s orders denying summary judgment and requiring defendants to be deposed because both orders were premised on a rejection of defendants’ claim of absolute immunity. The court then proceeded to consider another ground for defendants’ summary judgment motion in light of the “overlap” in the factors relevant to the nonappealable and the appealable issues. Id. at 255; see also Barrett v. United States, 798 F.2d 565, 570-71 (2d Cir.1986) (on appeal from denial of qualified and absolute immunity to certain defendants, court accepted pendent jurisdiction of plaintiff's cross-appeal of an independently unreviewable order granting absolute immunity to another defendant because all of the issues involved in the cross-appeal were also involved in the appeal of the collateral final order); cf. New York v. Nuclear Regulatory Comm’n, 550 F.2d 745, 760 (2d Cir.1977) (declining to review denial of summary judgment in course of appeal of interlocutory order on ground that expanded review would require additional expenditure of effort).
In Consolidation Coal Co. v. Local 1702, 683 F.2d 827, 831 (4th Cir.1982), where the court decided that “in the interests of efficiency” it would hear the interlocutory appeal of a union from the contempt order against it together with the appropriate appeal of the individual union officials, it is evident that the issues on the two appeals coincided.
In the final ease cited by the majority, Intermedics Infusaid, Inc. v. Regents of Univ. of Minnesota, 804 F.2d 129, 134 (Fed.Cir.1986), the court expressly stated that it would exercise pendent appellate jurisdiction over the appeal of a district court’s grant of a stay after accepting jurisdiction over another appealable interlocutory order, “because the two motions are closely interrelated factually and, indeed, are interdependent.”
Thus, even were we free to depart from Kershner’s restrictive requirement of “inextricable]” connection between the ap-pealable and nonappealable orders for assumption of pendent appellate jurisdiction, 670 F.2d at 449, the majority today in asserting jurisdiction over a wholly distinct issue surpasses even the more liberal requirements for assertion of pendent appellate jurisdiction of these other circuits.
There may be valid policy reasons to permit a court of appeals to assume jurisdiction over an appeal such as Rivera’s. We cannot avoid taking cognizance of the waste of judicial resources that will occur if we require Rivera to again bring an appeal after our remand to the district court produces a preordained result. However, the exercise of discretionary pendent jurisdiction simply because the result on remand and issues to be raised on subsequent appeal can be foreseen represents a significant alteration of our traditionally restrained approach to the exercise of jurisdiction.
More important, the majority establishes no workable guideline beyond that of referring to our need to exercise our discretion “sparingly.” Maj. op. at 287. As the court stated in Garner v. Wolfinbarger, 433 F.2d 117, 120 (5th Cir.1970): “[t]he ad hoc approach [to pendent jurisdiction] invites the parties to inject a sham issue as the vehicle to bring the case to this court at the interlocutory stage for a declaration on an order not otherwise reviewable [and] confuses the courts and the parties, who assume that because a discretionary ... order has been reviewed in one case it can be reviewed in any other.” The majority’s contention that no such danger is present in the instant case because a cross-appeal is here involved does not explain how this court is to avoid creating expectations that future litigants may be the beneficiaries of similar exercises of discretionary jurisdiction.
In the last analysis, the majority has made policy decisions that are more appropriately those of Congress. That body has *295the responsibility of fine-tuning our jurisdiction and may very well adopt a rule that gives us discretion to assume jurisdiction when efficient to do so. Until Congress acts, and because our precedent is to the contrary, I believe we must dismiss Rivera’s appeal. Accordingly, I respectfully dissent from part IIB of the majority opinion and would not reach Part III.