SCOTUS: Post-Trial Rule 50 Motion Not Required to Preserve Legal Issues

SCOTUS: Post-Trial Rule 50 Motion Not Required to Preserve Legal Issues

Resolved at Summary Judgment In a unanimous opinion, the Supreme Court held that a post-trial motion under Rule 50 is not required to preserve for appellate review a purely legal issue resolved at summary judgment.

In a prior case, the Court had held that an order denying summary judgment on sufficiency-of-the-evidence grounds is not appealable after a trial. Ortiz v. Jordan, 562 U.S. 180 (2011). As a result, to preserve such challenge for appellate review, a party must raise it again in a post-trial motion.

In this case, the Court noted that the holding in Ortiz was premised in that, once a case proceeds to trial, the full record developed in court supersedes the record existing at the time of the summary judgment motion.

However, because legal issues are not superseded by later events in a litigation, the Court noted that these rulings must follow the general rule and merge into the final judgment, at which point they are reviewable on appeal. In sum, the court reasoned that it would be futile to require a litigant to copy and paste a summary-judgment motion into post-trial format to reiterate a purely legal issue.

This decision resolves a circuit split and, in doing so, overrules the First Circuit’s holding in Ji v. Bose Corp., 626 F.3d 116, 127-28 (1^(st) Cir. 2010).