Title 28 United States Code Section 1291 gives U.S. Courts of Appeal “jurisdiction of appeals from all final decisions of the district courts of the United States . . . .” But as we saw a few weeks ago, this means that Courts of Appeal review judgments, not the logical steps leading to those judgments. So a challenge to a subsidiary finding is almost certainly a bad challenge. Now the First Circuit has issued an opinion neatly showing what happens when an appellant challenges the district court’s dicta.

A Ugandan civil-rights group sued Scott Lively under the Alien Tort Statute, pressing common-law claims for negligence and civil conspiracy. Lively moved for summary judgment, which the district court granted. But then Lively appealed to the First Circuit, objecting to what the Court of Appeals described as “a series of unflattering statements in [the district court’s] dispositive opinion.” The First Circuit affirmed.

Because Lively’s appeal simply grumbled at the district court’s dicta, the First Circuit did not have jurisdiction. The First Circuit began by noting that “[n]one of [the district court’s] statements . . . have any bearing on the analytical foundation of the dispositive order or impact the result. The statements are, therefore, dicta and, as such, they lack any binding or preclusive effect.” Courts of Appeals “review ‘judgments, not statements in opinions.’” “A necessary corollary of this proposition is that ‘a winner cannot appeal a judgment merely because there are passages in the court’s opinion that displease him.’”

“[F]ederal courts of appeals have no roving writ to review . . . a district court’s word choices . . . .” Here, Lively had gotten the judgment he asked for. Lively just didn’t like some of things the district court wrote in the opinion explaining the judgment. But  “Lively’s embarrassment in the face of the district court’s unflattering comments, without more, cannot suffice to manufacture appellate jurisdiction where none exists.”

Read the First Circuit’s opinion here.