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Thursday, June 12, 2025

Procedural law v. procedural culture

One interesting feature of teaching Civ Pro involves balancing formal rules and statutes against subtler, less formal practices (some from standing orders of each judge, some from the ether of the court system, some from general legal culture). Edith Beersden (Temple) has written about this as to discovery and other areas.

That distinction runs through Thursday' opinion in Parrish v. United States. A federal prisoner did not receive the district court order dismissing his civil rights action because he was released from federal prison and transferred to state prison the day after the order. When he received the order three months later, he sent a letter to the court that he called a notice of appeal. The Fourth Circuit recognized Parrish's letter/notice as a motion to reopen the time appeal; the district court granted that motion. But the Fourth Circuit, over the disagreement of both parties, held that Parrish had to file a new notice of appeal within the newly reopened time period; his original, premature notice (the letter to the district court) was insufficient.

The Court decided 8-1 that the original notice sufficed (Justice Gorsuch would have DIGed the case). But they split 6-2 as to why.

Writing for the majority, Justice Sotomayor focused on the controlling statutes (§ 2107 and FRAP 4). Those provisions codify the pre-existing common law concept of "relate-forward" (a prematurely filed document becomes effective later in time). Parrish had filed a premature notice of appeal, which related forward and became effective once the district court reopened the time to appeal and made the noticed appeal possible. Concurring in the judgment, Justice Jackson (with Justice Thomas) focused on the how litigants operate "everyday in federal court." When a party seeks leave to file a paper, it attaches that proposed paper to the motion; if the court grants the motion, it orders the underlying substantive paper docketed. Parrish filed a notice of appeal that the court treated as a motion to reopen the time to appeal (treating it as, in effect, a motion to reopen accompanied by a notice of appeal); having granted that motion (applying the requirements of § 2017), the district court follows regular practice of docketing the notice of appeal whose filing it approved.

Sotomayor and Jackson are the only members who have served as district judges (Sotomayor for about six years, Jackson for almost eight). And the other Justices often do not seem to understand or appreciate how things work in district courts. So it is interesting to see Sotomayor and Jackson on opposite sides of a divide between the legalistic approach and the cultural "this is how the trains operate" in the courts approach.

Posted by Howard Wasserman on June 12, 2025 at 06:20 PM in Civil Procedure, Howard Wasserman, Judicial Process | Permalink

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