The Supreme Court of the United States has straightened out some lingering confusion over jurisdictional time limits on appeal. These are rules that appellate lawyers work with day in and day out. They know them well. And well they should: A jurisdictional time limit cannot be waived or forfeited, but whether a party met the deadline can be asked at any time by the appellate court–and appellate courts are supposed to ask even if no one else does. But the same lawyers who know these rules cold also know that time limits aren’t always so clear-cut. That’s because not all time limits are jurisdictional–and it’s not always clear which or why.

The results can be alarming to someone who had a live appeal until the circuit court examined the calendar. Hamer sued Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago for employment discrimination under Title VII. The district court granted Neighborhood Housing’s motion for summary judgment. Hamer wanted to appeal but her lawyers didn’t, so Hamer filed a motion for a two-month extension of the appeal deadline while Hamer hired new counsel. Neighborhood Housing did not oppose the motion, and the district court granted it. After Hamer got new lawyers, she timely filed her notice of appeal. But then the Seventh Circuit, acting on its own, asked for briefing on whether a two-month extension was allowed under the Federal Rules of Appellate procedure—FRAP 4(a)(5)(C), in particular, which limits any extension for notices of appeal to 30 days. Neighborhood Housing then argued (for the first time) that Hamer could not get a two-month extension of her time to appeal. The Seventh Circuit agreed, noting that the time to appeal was “mandatory and jurisdictional,” and dismissed the appeal for lack of appellate jurisdiction. The Supreme Court granted certiorari and reversed.

Justice Ginsburg wrote the opinion for a unanimous court holding that the FRAP 4(a)(5)(C) deadline was not, in fact, “mandatory and jurisdictional.” That phrase was pulled from a Supreme Court case written back in a time when (per J. Ginsburg) the Court was “‘less than meticulous’ in our use of the term ‘jurisdictional.’” But a meticulous court knows that a time limit to file an appeal is only jurisdictional if it has a statutory basis. A time limit to file an appeal that is based on court rule is just a “mandatory claim-processing rule[]” and “[m]andatory claim-processing rules are less stern. If properly invoked, mandatory claim-processing rules must be enforced, but they may be waived or forfeited.” Because the time limit relied on by the Seventh Circuit was rule-based and not statute-based it was not jurisdictional (just mandatory), and could be waived or forfeited.

Sidenote: If you follow #AppellateTwitter at all, you’ll know this is the case where the Court observed that forfeiture and waiver are two different things. You forfeit a right when you fail to assert it. You waive a right when you decline to assert it.

Left open is whether Hamer gets her appeal after all: J. Ginsburg’s opinion lists the issues the Court did not decide, such as whether Neighborhood Housing’s failure to oppose the extension forfeited their right to object to the appeal, and whether the Seventh Circuit could carve out an equitable exception to the 30-day time limit of the rule. It’s a short, clear, and clarifying read, found here.