Come Back Later

Interesting opinion today from the Supreme Court. Apart from being Justice Sotomayor's first opinion, the case presents the interesting question of whether a district court's order denying a claim of attorney-client privilege should be immediately appealable.

The normal rule in federal litigation is the final judgment rule: no appeal of a district court's order is allowed until the case reaches its final judgment, at which time all the orders the district court has made in the course of the case can be appealed. This rule saves time and energy by blocking parties from appealing each order the district court makes, one at a time. Also, if the party that would have appealed an order ends up winning the case anyway, or if the case settles, appeal may be unnecessary. So the final judgment rule is a good general rule.

But sometimes appeal after final judgment may not do anything for the appellant. For example, if the defendant in a criminal case seeks bail pending trial and is denied, an appeal after the trial is over does no good -- the harm of not getting bail is irreversible at that point. So the Supreme Court has allowed appeal of "collateral" orders -- orders that are collateral to the merits of a case, that raise an important issue, and that are not effectively remediable by appeal of the final judgment.

So why doesn't the denial of a privilege claim fall in that category? After all, if a party is made to reveal a privileged communication, the communication can't be unrevealed by an appellate reversal years later. The party needs appellate review before revealing the communication.

The Supreme Court's almost-unanimous opinion focuses more on the need to avoid too many piecemeal appeals than on the strict logic of the collateral order doctrine. The Court said that the attorney-client privilege, considered as a whole, can be protected sufficiently by appeal, even if the privilege is wrongly lost in some individual cases. That will be cold comfort to litigants whose privilege is wrongly denied by district courts.

The Court's opinion perhaps makes good policy sense, but it reveals some weaknesses in the official statement of the collateral order doctrine.