Civil rights cases are expensive to bring and remarkably difficult to win.*  Requiring a victim of civil rights violations to have to participate in multiple appeals goes against the policy favoring litigation proceeding with “least expense.”** Moreover, the public interest in promoting judicial economy is served by avoiding piecemeal appeals.***

Therefore, we celebrate the recent ruling in favor of Firm Client Kenneth Craig Miller. The trial court denied a Motion filed by two defendants to require Miller to immediately appeal the dismissal of those two defendants. If the trial court granted the Motion, Miller would have been required to be a party to at least three appeals. See Magistrate Judge’s Order. 

* See Paul MacMahon, The Inquest and the Virtues of Soft Adjudication, 33 Yale L. & Pol’y Rev. 275, 301 (Spring, 2015) (“In practice civil rights suits under § 1983 are remarkably difficult to win; individual officers are protected by qualified immunity, and various doctrines make it difficult to pursue supervisors or localities for damages suits except in the most egregious cases.”); L. Timothy Perrin, et al., If It’s Broken, Fix It: Moving Beyond the Exclusionary Rule, 83 IOWA L. REV. 669,740 (1998) (“the expense of bringing a court action, and the slowness with which such actions often proceed, remain as impediments to the effectiveness of § 1983 actions in deterring or compensating for police misconduct.”); Suzette M. Malveaux, Front Loading and Heavy Lifting: How Pre-Dismissal Discovery Can Address the Detrimental Effect of Iqbal on Civil Rights Cases, 14 Lewis & Clark L. Rev. 65, 105 n. 222 (2010)). (Discussing Professor Roy L. Brooks’ analysis of the Twombly decision on civil rights cases) (Twombly’s plausibility standard “disadvantages the prosecution of civil rights cases because it impose a difficult, if not impossible, burden on the plaintiff to make specific factual allegations about evidence (or ‘proof’) known only to defendants.”); Suzette M. Malveaux, Clearing Civil Procedure Hurdles in the Quest for Justice, 37 Ohio N.U. L. Rev. 621, 623-31 (2011) (Discussing recent procedural changes that have made it more difficult for civil rights plaintiffs to bring claims); See generally, Davis, Francois, & Starger, The Persistence of the Confederate Narrative, 84 Tenn. L. Rev. 301 (Winter, 2017).

** See, e.g. Tex. R. Civ. P. 1.

*** See Hageman v. City Investing Co., 851 F.2d 69, 72 (2d Cir. 1988).