Court Opinion

ID: 9475705
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:36:14.366148+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:44:53.284862
License: Public Domain

PATRICK E. HIGGINBOTHAM, Circuit Judge,
with whom POLITZ and JOHNSON, Circuit Judges, join, specially concurring:
I concur with the result reached by Judge Gee but, with one eye on Chief Judge Clark’s able dissent, would as a matter of prudence do so on different and narrower grounds. We need not face the questions posed by a civil jury trial before a magistrate without the consent of the parties. There is no question but that when the magistrate made his recommendation to the district judge no parties objected to the magistrate’s having presided over the trial, although they were well aware that a magistrate had presided. In every real sense they consented.1 It is true that the official forms require all parties to give written consent to a magistrate’s jurisdiction under § 636(c) and true that the parties did not do so. The deviation is the magistrate’s failure to comply with the implementing rule by insuring that consent to trial before the magistrate take the form of a written consent. See Fed.R.Civ.P. 73(a) and 73(b). I would neither find this violation of the rule to be “jurisdictional” and not waivable, nor so substantial that we ought to consider it, sua sponte.
I also concur with the supervisory directive for future cases.

. Any flaw in the magistrate’s jurisdiction resulting from Christian’s early objection, was cured when he consented. See Inecon Agricorporation v. Tribal Farms, Inc., 656 F.2d 498 (9th Cir.1981) (dismissal of non-diverse party on appeal saved jurisdiction of judgment earlier entered); Othman v. Globe Indem. Co., 759 F.2d 1458 (9th Cir.1985); Publicker Industries v. Roman Ceramics, 603 F.2d 1065 (3d Cir.1979) (same).