Ronald Gerard Boyajian v. United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

Whether a three-judge panel may usurp the authority of the full court of appeals by -, intercepting and terminating a petition for a writ of mandamus addressed to the en banc court, thereby nullifying the mechanism Congress and this Court have established under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 40 for ensuring circuit uniformity and resolving questions of exceptional importance.

Whether a court of appeals’ use of unpublished, non-precedential orders to create an intra-circuit conflict on a constitutional question, followed by an ad hoc procedural blockade to prevent en banc review and publication of the conflicting decision, constitutes an abuse of the “appellate shadow docket” that warrants this Court’s supervisory intervention.