Philip Jay Fetner v. Hotel Street Capital, LLC, et al.

Petitioner asks this Court to review whether he was denied a constitutional appeal on the false preliminary premise that the appellate courts — both the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia and the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit - lacked jurisdiction: a) because the appeal to the District Court was not based on a “final” order of the Bankruptcy Court nor did the order appealed qualify otherwise for jurisdictional purposes; b) because the appeal to both courts was “moot;” and c) because the appeal to the Court of Appeals was improper as the latter may not review a District Court’s determination on whether a Bankruptcy Court’s order was a final order. The importance of this matter, aside from correcting the manifest injustice to Petitioner of wrongfully applying jurisdictional principles to prevent an appeal on the merits, all as discussed below, is that the ruling by the Court of Appeals effectively guts a debtor’s mandated constitutional right to an appeal in a wide range of circumstances, including a fundamental misunderstanding of mootness. Finally, it is not farfetched to suggest that this case, if upheld or left alone, will drive another nail in the already problematic coffin of an individual debtor Chapter 11. The importance of this matter will be argued further by Petitioner in this brief.