Jordan Zahler v. Jackson Lewis P.C., et al.

Whether an entity not legally authorized to exist in a jurisdiction possesses the First Amendment right to petition tribunals in that jurisdiction—a prerequisite inherent in the Noerr-Pennington doctrine that no court has articulated because no case previously raised it.

Whether a clerk’s 143-day refusal to perform the mandatory ministerial duty prescribed by Fed. R. Civ. P. 55(a)—“the clerk must enter the party’s default”— warrants mandamus relief, and whether an appellate court may deny such relief by recharacterizing the requested entry of default as a request for default judgment.

Whether the proceedings below so far departed from the accepted and usual course of judicial proceedings as to call for an exercise of this Court’s supervisory power, where: (a) the district court granted a motion its own published policies required it to deny, after defendants admitted violating the mandatory prerequisite for filing it; (b) the district court prejudged a pending mandamus petition in a footnote to the case-dispositive opinion; and (c) the appellate court’s opinion mischaracterized the relief sought, contradicted its own factual recitation, and selectively engaged with a supplemental filing while ignoring the documented facts it contained.