Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 2017

Hamer v. Neighborhood Hous. Servs. of Chi.

583 U.S. 17 | 138 S. Ct. 13 | 199 L. Ed. 2d 249

Full access

Unlock the video and quiz

The written brief is free to read below. Subscribe to watch the video explainer and take the quiz.

Create an account Log in

Takeaway

In short, this case holds that an appellate deadline found only in a court rule is mandatory but not jurisdictional, so its violation does not automatically require dismissal unless the opposing party properly preserves the objection.

Background

Charmaine Hamer sued Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago and Fannie Mae for employment discrimination under Title VII and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. The District Court granted summary judgment for the defendants and entered final judgment on September 14, 2015. Ordinarily, Hamer had until October 14 to file a notice of appeal.

Before that deadline, Hamer's attorneys moved to withdraw because they disagreed with her about pursuing an appeal. They also requested a two-month extension so that Hamer could find new appellate counsel. The District Court granted both motions and extended the notice-of-appeal deadline to December 14. Hamer filed her notice on December 11.

The defendants did not object to the extension in the District Court and initially described Hamer's appeal as timely in their appellate docketing statement. The Seventh Circuit nevertheless raised timeliness on its own and dismissed the appeal for lack of jurisdiction. It reasoned that Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 4(a)(5)(C) limits an extension to 30 days after the ordinary deadline or 14 days after the extension order, whichever is later, and that the District Court's two-month extension exceeded that limit.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 4(a)(5)(C)'s limit on the length of an extension to file a civil notice of appeal is jurisdictional.

Holding

No. The Rule's 30-day limitation is a mandatory claim-processing rule, not a jurisdictional requirement, because Congress did not enact that particular time limit in a statute.

Reasoning

Only Congress can establish or restrict the subject-matter jurisdiction of lower federal courts. Accordingly, a deadline governing an appeal between Article III courts is jurisdictional when the deadline is prescribed by statute, not merely by a court-promulgated procedural rule.

The distinction has important consequences. A missed jurisdictional deadline deprives the court of adjudicatory authority, cannot be waived or forfeited, and must be raised by the court even if the parties do not. A mandatory claim-processing rule must be enforced when properly invoked, but an opposing party may waive or forfeit an objection to its violation.

Section 2107(c) authorizes a district court to extend the time to appeal upon a showing of excusable neglect or good cause, but it does not set a general maximum duration for such extensions. The statute does impose a 14-day reopening period for specified cases in which the prospective appellant did not receive timely notice of the judgment.

Rule 4(a)(5)(C), by contrast, supplies the general restriction that no extension may exceed 30 days after the normal appeal deadline or 14 days after the order granting the extension, whichever is later. Because that restriction appears in the Rule but nowhere in § 2107, it is not jurisdictional.

Bowles v. Russell did not require a different result. In Bowles, the appellant filed outside the 14-day reopening period specifically authorized by § 2107(c), so the missed deadline was jurisdictional. The Seventh Circuit mistakenly treated Rule 4(a)(5)(C) as though it implemented a comparable statutory limit, when the statute contains no such general 30-day cap.

The Court declined the defendants' invitation to infer that Congress accidentally omitted the general 30-day limit when it amended § 2107 in 1991. The Court applies the enacted text: a time prescription transferring adjudicatory authority from one Article III court to another is jurisdictional if it appears in a statute; otherwise, it is a claim-processing rule.