Whether federal courts can require waiver of appeal rights as a condition for receiving an award

QUESTIONS PRESENTED The central question posed in this appeal is as follows: Whether federal district courts possess the authority to require appeal rights to be waived as a condition for receiving an award available under law. The District Court below appears to be the first in the history of modern jurisprudence to refuse to consider granting a monetary recovery to any applicant that had not expressly or implicitly consented to relinquish the right to appeal the decision. Secure in their belief that their decisions could never be reviewed, both the District Court and the panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit then proceeded to abdicate their fundamental judicial responsibilities to carefully scrutinize and adjudicate the applications submitted by eighty-nine law firms seeking an equitable apportionment of the estimated $550 million Common Benefit Fund (“Fund”) that had been collected in the Transvaginal Mesh Multi-District Litigation proceedings. These judicial duties were relegated instead to Respondent, the Common Benefit Fee and Cost Committee (“FCC”), which consists of eight attorney representatives of the applicant law firms and one private individual. Predictably, the FCC’s members awarded themselves almost exactly two-thirds of the fund, while flatly refusing to allow any of the non-member firms to review the time li QUESTIONS PRESENTED—Continued entries or expense receipts that purportedly justified their stunning allotment. Petitioners, Anderson Law Offices and Benjamin H. Anderson (collectively, “ALO”), and other non-member firms lodged numerous objections to the federal court’s abandonment of its due process responsibilities and sought an opportunity to be heard through an evidentiary hearing, all to no avail. The District Court casually dispensed with dozens of well-developed objections and approved the FCC’s evident self-dealing in a single six-page opinion. And in a single-sentence decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit dismissed Petitioners’ appeal with no further explanation. Subsumed within the central question of whether federal courts are empowered to order the relinquishment of appeal rights are the following specific issues of concern that are ripe for review: a. What are the elemental requirements for an enforceable waiver of the right to appellate review in federal proceedings? b. Whether assent to a forfeiture of appeal rights may be implied from mere acquiescence to a district court’s order. c. Whether express and knowing consent to a forfeiture of appeal rights must be established either through a valid written instrument or in open court. ili QUESTIONS PRESENTED—Continued d. Whether the scope of implied or involuntary waivers of appeal rights must be narrowly construed against the forfeiture under federal law. e. Whether there is an enforceable, implied guarantee in an otherwise valid waiver of appeal rights that the federal court will still abide by its own rulings in the case as well as basic principles of due process.