In re FOOD LION, INCORPORATED, FAIR LABOR STANDARDS ACT “EFFECTIVE SCHEDULING” LITIGATION.
Nos. 94-2360, 94-2645 and 95-1274
United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit
Argued Oct. 30, 1995. Decided Jan. 16, 1996.
73 F.3d 528
As a result, neither notice nor investigation occurred until after claimant‘s more specific letter of January 10, 1991:
Enclosed with this letter please find photostatic copy of a “Not fit for duty” status slip covering the period 10/3/89 to 10/17/89. I would greatly appreciate it if you would please set this matter down for a conference on the issue of temporary total disability covering the above period.
Indeed, following this January letter, events moved forward: notice to I.T.O. on January 24, a conference on February 6, and a formal hearing before an ALJ on October 8, 1991.
Unfortunately, by 1991, the power granted to the district director by Congress to review Pettus’ compensation order had expired. Accordingly, Pettus and the district director, by attempting to commence review in January of 1991, ran afoul of Congress’ “one-year time limit imposed on the power of the [district director] to modify existing orders.” Intercounty, 422 U.S. at 11, 95 S.Ct. at 2022. To allow inscrutable, single-sentence letters like those of September and December 1989 to toll the limitations period would set Congress’ enactment at naught.3
IV.
Statutes of limitation “represent a pervasive legislative judgment ... that ‘the right to be free of stale claims in time comes to prevail over the right to prosecute them.‘” United States v. Kubrick, 444 U.S. 111, 117, 100 S.Ct. 352, 357, 62 L.Ed.2d 259 (1979), quoting Railroad Telegraphers v. Railway Express Agency, 321 U.S. 342, 349, 64 S.Ct. 582, 586, 88 L.Ed. 788 (1944). In deference to that legislative judgment, we must reverse the decision of the Benefits Review Board and remand with directions to deny the compensation claim.
REVERSED AND REMANDED.
In re FOOD LION, INCORPORATED, FAIR LABOR STANDARDS ACT “EFFECTIVE SCHEDULING” LITIGATION.
Jeffrey L. ROYSTER; Daniel Baker; Clarence L. Alston; Charles V. Strickland, Jr.; Ron Murchison; Larry Britt; Carl Williams; Truman Surles; Tim Layden; Kim Pippa; Jeffrey Barnes; Glenn Johnson; Steve Twiddy; Larry Riley; Wayne Neil Hand, Jr.; Michael Alphin; Harvey Keith Matthews; Terry N. Conner; James E. Daniels; Billy Maddox; Russell Thomas; Jonathan Anderson; Woodrow Breeden; Aaron Norris; James Gruber; Reginald Ashford; Clinton E. Bloyer, III; Ricky Coltren; Billy Ray Collins; William Dale Fitzgerald; Robin Dale Stewart; Stephen A. Williams; Reginald Gill; Lester Britt, Appellants,
and
Terry W. McLawhon, on behalf of himself and all others similarly situated; Keith Lamont Perry, on behalf of himself and all others similarly situated; Ronald Grannis; Boston D. McCornell; Randy E. Jones; Timothy E. Peele; Andy Czubai; Christopher Ayden Surles; Kelly E. Quinn; James L. Royal; Francis D. Carpenter; Gregory Todd Ring; Lester Jerome Mitchell; Rodney M. Ramsey; William Richard Hamm; Billy M. Parson; Woodrow Carroll, Jr.; Bobby Glymph; Kevin Carr; Brad Clark; Billy Williams, Plaintiffs,
v.
FOOD LION, INCORPORATED, Defendant-Appellee.
In re FOOD LION, INCORPORATED, FAIR LABOR STANDARDS ACT “EFFECTIVE SCHEDULING” LITIGATION.
Donald T. LEDFORD; J. Michael Oakes; Michael Cardoza; R. Chuck Villarreal, Jr.; Roy Sarter; Larry Worley; Tommy Arrington; Billy Baker; Cheryl Born; Danny Buckner; Robert Calloway; Donna Catlin; Kim Caudill; Joseph
v.
FOOD LION, INCORPORATED, Defendant-Appellee.
In re FOOD LION INCORPORATED, FAIR LABOR STANDARDS ACT “EFFECTIVE SCHEDULING” LITIGATION.
C. Marshall HOLLAND, Jr.; Charles Lee Smith; Walter Crawford Thomas, Jr.; William Brian Barefoot; Tonya Y. Brown; Rosa Bond; Earnest A. Bryant; Wayne Jay Cochran; William A. Cooke; Jeffrey J. Goerman; Keith Harris; Charles S. Knowles; Faye Lee; John M. Lynch; Vernon W. Menifee; Bruce E. Pope; Bobby A. Robertson; Warren D. Roman; Keith W. Tingen; Haskell Turner, Plaintiffs-Appellants,
and
Darryl Ellis; Debbie Gardner; Erin Rice; Kenneth W. Cooper; Alan E. Erett; Danny Leeander Person; Joe William Baker; Peter M. Sloka, Sr.; Johnny Andrew Punch, III; Ester M. Woods; Fred McMillan; Isaac Ray Pack; Alexander J. Smith; Steve J. Kirsch; Marilyn S. Wilson; Vicki Ann Wood; Phillip Larry Oldham; Terry A. Young; Richard W. McDonald; Michael Wrenn; Stephen G. Parrish; Randall Lee Rigsbee; Delores Wilson; Dietta M. Edgren; Matthew K. Haensler; John Richard Earp; William P. Haskins; W. Edward Campbell; John L. Wallace; Craig Wilson Pressley; Stan M. Griffin; Mary Peeples; David G. Myers; Randy Lake; Kenneth Randall Cooper; Woodrow Williams, Jr.; Erin Rice Albright; Leisha Baynard; Stephan Parrish, Plaintiffs,
v.
FOOD LION, INCORPORATED, Defendant-Appellee.
ARGUED: Edward G. Connette, III, Lesesne & Connette, Charlotte, North Carolina; James McDaniel Johnson, Bryan, Jones, Johnson & Snow, Dunn, North Carolina, for Appellants. William Pinkney Herbert Cary, Brooks, Pierce, McLendon, Humphrey & Leonard, L.L.P., Greensboro, North Carolina, for Appellee. ON BRIEF: James T. Williams, Jr., M. Daniel McGinn, Brooks, Pierce, McLendon, Humphrey & Leonard, L.L.P., Greensboro, North Carolina, for Appellee.
Before HALL and WILKINSON, Circuit Judges, and BUTZNER, Senior Circuit Judge.
Remanded with instructions by published opinion. Judge HALL wrote the majority opinion, in which Judge WILKINSON joined. Senior Judge BUTZNER wrote a dissenting opinion.
K. K. HALL, Circuit Judge:
A number of plaintiffs appeal from summary judgment orders entered in three actions that were consolidated with eight other actions for pretrial proceedings. Because there are numerous other plaintiffs who have not yet appealed but who were dismissed by the same district court on essentially the same grounds as one or more of the appellants, we believe that
I
Beginning in 1991, several small groups of employees and former employees of Food Lion, Inc., filed civil actions in federal courts in a number of southern states in which Food Lion owns and operates grocery stores. In each of these actions, the plaintiffs asserted claims for unpaid overtime and penalties under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA),
On June 13, 1992, the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML or Panel) issued an order transferring two of these actions, one from the District of South Carolina (Scott) and the other from the Western District of North Carolina (Ledford), to the Eastern District of North Carolina for “coor-
In October 1992, court-approved notices were sent to some 60,000 current and former Food Lion employees who had worked in stores in North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Virginia, or Tennessee after October 16, 1989.4 Almost one thousand of these employees (including the named plaintiffs in the eleven separate actions) opted into the litigation by returning “consent forms,” and each employee returning a consent form was assigned a “court number.” A master file was created in a consolidated case denominated In re: Food Lion, Inc., Fair Labor Standards Act “Effective Scheduling” Litigation, and each “opt-in” plaintiff was assigned to one of the individual cases.
In a series of pretrial orders, Judge Fox dismissed the claims of about half of the plaintiffs on summary judgment. On March 22, 1994, a “suggestion of remand”5 was filed by the district court and forwarded to the Panel. On June 2, 1994, the Panel remanded eight of the actions to their respective transferor courts.6
After remand, one of the two cases remaining in the Eastern District of North Carolina was completed, and an appeal was taken by a number of the plaintiffs whose claims had been dismissed by summary judgment during the consolidated pretrial proceedings (the Royster appeal). At about the same time, some of the plaintiffs who had met a similar fate in Judge Fox‘s court, but who were part of cases from one of the two other districts in North Carolina, asked for and received
II
One of the charter Panel members wrote the following with regard to whether transferor judges should modify orders of transferee judges:
[I]t would be improper to permit a transferor judge to overturn orders of a transferee judge even though error in the latter might result in reversal of the final judgment of the transferor court. If transferor judges were permitted to upset rulings of transferee judges, the result would be an undermining of the purposes and usefulness of transfer under Section 1407 for coordinated or consolidated pretrial proceedings because those proceedings would then lack the finality (at the trial court level) requisite to the convenience of witnesses and parties and the efficient conduct of actions.
Weigle, S.A., The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, Transferor Courts and Transferee Courts, 78 F.R.D. 575, 577 (1977). The Food Lion cases present us with the opportunity to foster the transfer statute‘s goals.
A
The multidistrict litigation statute,
Because all of the remanded Food Lion cases had claims that had not been dismissed, the dismissed parties were foreclosed by the “final order rule” from appealing prior to the remand. On remand by the Panel, however, some of the dismissed plaintiffs in the two remanded North Carolina cases successfully moved for Rule 54(b) determinations in their respective transferor courts, and their appeals (Ledford and Holland) dovetailed with the appeal from the final judgment in McLawhon, one of Judge Fox‘s original cases. The result is the sort of piecemeal litigation that the multidistrict scheme was intended to discourage.
The three appeals before us involve precisely the same set of issues as any appeals that might be taken from the summary judgment orders in the cases remanded to the transferor courts outside North Carolina. While we have no reason to upset the remand of those claims that remain alive, we believe that permitting the transferor courts (and, possibly, the Courts of Appeal for the Sixth and Eleventh Circuits) to reconsider the transferee court‘s summary judgment orders will frustrate the aims of § 1407.9 The overriding purpose of the multidistrict procedure dictates that these claims be decided in the same appellate forum.10
B
Because of the distinct factual predicates of each claim, Judge Fox wisely limited his role to sorting out the potential claimants and clarifying each claim to some degree.11 Each of the dismissals falls into one of about six or seven broad categories, and the appeals of the dismissal orders in each category typically involve a single dispositive issue of law.12 Even accounting for the peculiar facts of each case, it is clearly more efficient to provide for review by one appellate court in one proceeding rather than leaving open the
C
The better practice in this case would have been for the dismissed parties to have requested, and for Judge Fox to have directed, the entry of
III
In the interests of judicial economy, we will delay a decision on the pending appeals so that those plaintiffs whose claims were dismissed by Judge Fox may bring their appeals to this court. Accordingly, we order as follows:
- the pending appeals from the three North Carolina districts are held in abeyance;
- the Panel is directed to retransfer from the District of South Carolina, the Northern District of Florida, and the Eastern District of Tennessee to the Eastern District of North Carolina those claims that were dismissed by Judge Fox prior to the June 20, 1994, remand by the Panel;
- after retransfer in accordance with the foregoing paragraph, the district court for the Eastern District of North Carolina is directed to enter final judgment as to all such claims, pursuant to Fed.R.Civ.P. 54(b); any appeals taken pursuant to such certifications will be heard in the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.15
An appropriate order will be entered.
BUTZNER, Senior Circuit Judge, dissenting:
In its suggestion of remand of the cases that had been consolidated for pretrial proceedings, the district court stated:
Due to the fact-specific nature of this litigation, these cases do not lend themselves to a consolidated disposition on the merits. It appears likely that each individual case must be disposed of in unique fashion, which is a process better left to the discretion and planning of the district judges within the districts from whence these cases originated.
The district court recognized that its pretrial rulings were interlocutory and that they
The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation initially issued a conditional remand order to which Food Lion objected. Subsequently, Food Lion withdrew its objection and the Judicial Panel issued its order providing that the previously consolidated cases are “remanded to their respective transferor courts for further proceedings as provided in
Section 1407(a) authorizes the Judicial Panel to remand actions that have been consolidated for pretrial proceedings “at or before the conclusion of such pretrial proceedings” to the transferor district courts “unless [such actions] shall have been previously terminated.” None of the actions that the Judicial Panel remanded was previously terminated in the pretrial proceedings.
Section 1407(e) governs appellate review of orders of the Judicial Panel. This section provides that no proceedings for review of any order of the Judicial Panel may be permitted except by extraordinary writ pursuant to the provisions of
General Tire & Rubber Co. v. Watkins, 373 F.2d 361 (4th Cir.1967), which is cited as authority in the opinion at 532 n.10, is far afield. In that case we dealt with a petition for a writ of mandamus filed by one of the parties. We directed a district court in this circuit to transfer a case to a district in another circuit where a similar case was proceeding. We acted because the issuance of a writ was “the only practical or adequate remedy for an abuse of discretion.” 373 F.2d at 364. In the case before us, in contrast, there is no abuse of discretion on the part of either the district court, which gave very cogent reasons for its suggestion of remand, or the Judicial Panel, which acted pursuant to its statutory authority. No other authority is cited for the unprecedented reversal of an order of the Judicial Panel that remands actions pursuant to the authority granted it in § 1407(a).
I have no quarrel with FMC Corporation v. Glouster Engineering Co., 830 F.2d 770 (7th Cir.1987), or In re Korean Air Lines Disaster of September 1, 1983, 829 F.2d 1171 (D.C.Cir.1987), which place appellate jurisdiction in the court of appeals of the circuit where the transferee district court is located. But the Judicial Panel had not remanded these cases to the transferor courts. Certainly these cases are not authority for reversing an order of the Judicial Panel.
In the case now before us there is no petition for an extraordinary writ. The parties apparently are well satisfied with the status quo. They urge us to decide the cases now before us. We have three cases before us: cases from the Western and Middle Districts of North Carolina were properly certified, and a final order was entered in one case originating in the Eastern District of North Carolina. Another case from the Eastern District settled or was adjudicated with no appeal taken.
The case from the Eastern District of Virginia, we are told, has been settled or adjudicated, and no appeal will be taken.
No final order has been entered in the three South Carolina cases. They have not been certified for appeal, and the parties, we are told, are engaged in settlement negotiations on the claims that Judge Fox did not dismiss. Eventually these cases may come to us either by certification or by final order. Or they may be settled.
We are told that claims in the two Tennessee cases have been settled or adjudicated and that no appeal will be taken.
This leaves only the Florida case where neither a final order nor certification has been entered. We are told the parties are engaged in settlement negotiations as to those claims not dismissed by Judge Fox. We have no jurisdiction over this case because of the Judicial Panel‘s remand order. I have no
Parenthetically, I note that in General Tire & Rubber Co., we observed that we were not concerned “with the problem of whether or not we shall ultimately lose our jurisdiction to review to another appellate court.” 373 F.2d at 370. We were, however, concerned with effective judicial administration. To gather back into this circuit the cases the Judicial Panel remanded will, I am afraid, negate effective judicial administration and subject the parties to delay and to needless counsel fees and expenses.
Rather than reaching out to the extraordinary, unsolicited, and ill-advised writ of mandamus, I would consider the merits of the cases before us, realizing that only one other circuit could potentially rule on these issues. The greater danger to our system comes not from possible circuit conflict but from failure to honor the role that Congress prescribed for the transferee court and the Judicial Panel in establishing a system of multidistrict litigation.