Mark Barinholtz v. HomeAdvisor, Inc., et al.

This controversy reaches the Court against a backdrop of the convergence of three strains of federal appellate timeliness doctrine, all working on a sliding scale, and at the same time. As this Court has unanimously sought to clarify in Hamer v. Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago, 583 U.S. 154, internal pp. 9-10 (2017), the outmoded formulation of temporal limitations on timely appellate review as cast in terms of “mandatory and jurisdictional,” … “is erroneous and confounding terminology,” and was a “less than meticulous” formulation which has led to the type of inconsistency this Court highlighted and sought to remedy in Hamer. The questions presented are: Should the federal courts, in an effort to serve the purposes of the public’s interest in gaining access to justice, be following timeliness rules applicable to appellate review that are most strictly construed, versus allowing the flexibility to exercise rights of review in an orderly, and reasonably calculated duration from commencement of an action through finality? And if so, i.e., that a stricter interpretation applies, does that level of strictness of construction constitute misapplication of principles of jurisdiction which will lead to burdensome review which, in turn, negatively impacts the proper, broadly consistent application of Fed. R. App. P. 3 and 4, and Fed. R. Civ. P. 59, and 60?