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Issues with consolidated dockets at circuit court level #3931

Open v-anne opened 3 months ago

v-anne commented 3 months ago

This is different from #2185.

Often when regulations are challenged in the courts of appeals, the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) randomly selects a court to hear them, and then transfers all the petitions to that court. You might recall that this was the procedure used for the OSHA COVID-19 vaccine mandate litigation.

Some courts of appeals are better about handling this than others. For instance, the 5th Circuit will typically consolidate all of the cases from different circuits under one docket number, minimizing clutter.

Others, like the 8th Circuit, unfortunately, do not execute it this way. Instead, they assign a separate case number to every challenge filed. This leads to situations where there are 10+ case numbers challenging the same regulation. To my knowledge these dockets are consolidated, and lawyers file the same pleading across all of the cases. Unfortunately this ends up with people buying differing filings on different docket pages, making it difficult to access in one place, and often without an extensive search, people might buy a filing that's already on a companion docket. It would be nice to consider one of two things:

(1) Add a tab near the top of the page, next to "docket entries" and "parties & attorneys," that says "companion cases". Link to all of the companion dockets there. (2) On each docket entry, if a filing has not yet been bought on the selected docket but has been bought on one of the companion cases, display a popup to users informing them that in 99% of cases, that filing should be exactly the same as the one they are about to purchase. This might be a good addition to the Chrome extension as well (for use in PACER).

Here is an example of what I'm talking about.

Iowa v. SEC has the following companion cases: [24-1522, 24-1623, 24-1624, 24-1626, 24-1627, 24-1628, 24-1631, 24-1633, 24-1634]. Unfortunately, some filings show up as PDFs on its page and others on one of the companion cases.

mlissner commented 3 months ago

Thanks for filing, @v-anne. These dopple-bugs are real tough ones for me. Fixing it properly has been the blocker for doing anything about it, but I am aware of the issues, and I do hope to fix them someday. I think we've got the team in place to do it now, but the last missing piece is finding the priority to do so. It's quite hard to fix relative to the gains users would get.