Anderson Law Offices, et al. v. Common Benefit Fee and Cost Committee

The central question posed in this appeal is as follows: Whether federal district courts possess the authority to require appeal rights to be waived as a condition for receiving an award available under law. The District Court below appears to be the first in the history of modern jurisprudence to refuse to consider granting a monetary recovery to any applicant that had not expressly or implicitly consented to relinquish the right to appeal the decision. Secure in their belief that their decisions could never be reviewed, both the District Court and the panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit then proceeded to abdicate their fundamental judicial responsibilities to carefully scrutinize and adjudicate the applications submitted by eighty-nine law firms seeking an equitable apportionment of the estimated $550 million Common Benefit Fund (“Fund”) that had been collected in the Transvaginal Mesh Multi-District Litigation proceedings. These judicial duties were relegated instead to Respondent, the Common Benefit Fee and Cost Committee (“FCC”), which consists of eight attorney representatives of the applicant law firms and one private individual. Predictably, the FCC’s members awarded themselves almost exactly two-thirds of the fund, while flatly refusing to allow any of the non-member firms to review the time