# Houston v. Lack

> Supreme Court of the United States · June 24, 1988 · 487 U.S. 266

URL: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9431403

## Case

- **Full name:** Houston v. Lack, Warden
- **Court:** Supreme Court of the United States
- **Decided:** June 24, 1988
- **Citations:** 487 U.S. 266; 11 Fed. R. Serv. 3d 849; 56 U.S.L.W. 4728; 108 S. Ct. 2379; 101 L. Ed. 2d 245; 1988 U.S. LEXIS 2875
- **Precedential status:** Published
- **Opinion:** Dissent by Scalia
- **Judges:** Brennan, White, Marshall, Blackmun, Stevens, Scalia, Rehnquist, O'Connor, Kennedy
- **Cited by:** 6,622 later opinions in the Frix Law Library

## Citator (automated)

- **Yellow flag:** Declined to follow by Walker-Bey v. Department of Corrections, 222 Mich. App. 605 (1997).
- Negative treatments: 2
- Distinguished by: 2
- Full citator and citing cases: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9431403

## How later opinions describe it (automated extraction)

- holding that a prisoner appearing pro se satisfies the time limit for filing a notice of appeal if he delivers the notice to prison officials within the time specified; this “prison mailbox” rule is justified by the litigant’s dependence on the prison mail system and lack of c…
- holding that mailbox-filing rule applies to notices of appeal and explaining, “the pro se prisoner has no choice but to entrust the forwarding of his notice of appeal to prison authorities whom he cannot control or supervise and who may have every incentive to delay”
- concluding that pro se prisoner’s petition is deemed filed “at the time petitioner delivered it to the prison authorities for forwarding to the court clerk”
- concluding that a “notice of appeal Claim One: “Under the influence of medication [at] the time of so-called confession.” (§ 2254 Petition at 5.
- holding that, under the prison mailbox rule, a submission from a prisoner is considered filed on the date the prisoner signed the submission

## Opinion text

*277 Justice Scalia,
with whom The Chief Justice, Justice O’Connor, and Justice Kennedy join, dissenting.
Today’s decision obliterates the line between textual construction and textual enactment. It would be within the realm of normal judicial creativity (though in my view wrong) to interpret the phrase “filed with the clerk” to mean “mailed to the clerk,” or even “mailed to the clerk or given to a person bearing an obligation to mail to the clerk.” But interpreting it to mean “delivered to the clerk or, if you are a prisoner, delivered to your warden” is no more acceptable than any of an infinite number of variants, such as: “delivered to the clerk or, if you are out of the country, delivered to a United States consul”; or “delivered to the clerk or, if you are a soldier on active duty in a war zone, delivered to your commanding officer”; or “delivered to the clerk or, if you are held hostage in a foreign country, meant to be delivered to the clerk.” Like these other examples, the Court’s rule makes a good deal of sense. I dissent only because it is not the rule that we have promulgated through congressionally prescribed procedures.
I
This case requires us to construe one statutory provision and two provisions of the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure. The former is 28 U. S. C. § 2107 , which sets a statutory, jurisdictional deadline for the filing of notices of appeal in civil actions such as this habeas proceeding. It provides:
“[N]o appeal shall bring any judgment, order or decree in an action, suit, or proceeding of a civil nature before a court of appeals for review unless notice of appeal is filed, within thirty days after the entry of such judgment, order or decree” (emphasis added).
*278 Although the statute itself does not define when a notice of appeal has been “filed” or designate with whom it must be filed, the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure fill in these details. Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 3(a) provides:
“An appeal permitted by law as of right from a district court to a court of appeals shall be taken by filing a notice of appeal with the clerk of the district court within the time allowed by Rule 4” (emphasis added).
This is supplemented by Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 4(a)(1), which provides:
“In a civil case in which an appeal is permitted by law as of right from a district court to a court of appeals the notice of appeal required by Rule 3 shall be filed with the clerk of the district court within 30 days after the date of entry of the judgment or order appealed from ...” (emphasis added).
It is clear, then, that there was a notice of appeal effective to give the Court of Appeals jurisdiction in this case if, and only if, it was “filed with the clerk of the district court” within the 30-day period.
The Court observes that “filed with the clerk” could mean many different things, including merely “mailed to the clerk.” Ante, at 272-274. That is unquestionable. But it is the practice in construing such a phrase to pick a single meaning, and not to impart first one, and then another, as the judicially perceived equities of individual cases might require. Some statutory terms, such as “restraint of trade,” Business Electronics Corp. v. Sharp Electronics Corp., 485 U. S. 717, 731-733 (1988), invite judicial judgment from case to case; but a provision establishing a deadline upon which litigants are supposed to rely is not of that sort. That is why we adopted the proviso in Rule 28.2 of our own Rules, which the Court unexpectedly invokes in support of its position. Rule 28.2 reads:
*279 “To be timely filed, a document must be received by the Clerk within the time specified for filing, except that any document shall be deemed timely filed if it has been deposited in a United States post office or mailbox, with first-class postage prepaid, and properly addressed to the Clerk of this Court, within the time allowed for filing, and if there is filed with the Clerk a notarized statement by a member of the Bar of this Court, setting forth the details of the mailing, and stating that to his knowledge the mailing took place on a particular date within the permitted time.” (Emphasis added.)
Since “received by the Clerk” must, in the context of such a rule, reasonably be understood to have a unitary meaning, which would of course normally be actual receipt, we felt constrained to specify an exception in which mailing would suffice. It would have been as inappropriate (though no less possible) there as in the present case to create the exception through interpretation — reasoning that the Post Office can be deemed the agent of the addressee, Household Fire & Carriage Accident Ins. Co. v. Grant, 4 Ex. D. 216 (1879) (“[P]ost office [is] the agent of both parties”), and hence it is theoretically possible to consider the document “received by” the Clerk when it is mailed, and the policy considerations usually militating in favor of a rule of actual receipt are well enough satisfied by an affidavit from a member of our Bar, etc.
If the need for a uniform meaning is apparent even with respect to ordinary statutory deadlines, and indeed even with respect to court-created rules that can be amended at the judges’ discretion, it is even more apparent when a statutory deadline bearing upon the very jurisdiction of the courts is at issue. In that context, allowing courts to give different meanings from case to case allows them to expand and contract the scope of their own competence. That this is not envisioned is plain (if any citation is needed) from Rule 26(b) of the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure, which specifically *280 excepts from the courts’ broad equitable power to “suspend the requirements or provisions of any of these rules in a particular case,” Fed. Rule App. Proc. 2, the power to “enlarge the time for filing a notice of appeal.” When we adopted Rules 3 and 4 of the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure we delayed, as required by law, their effective date until 90 days after they were “reported to Congress by the Chief Justice,” 28 U. S. C. § 2072 , so that Congress might consider whether it wished to legislate any changes in them. Surely Congress could not have imagined that “filing . . . with the clerk” in Rule 3(a) and “filed with the clerk” in Rule 4(a)(1) could have a meaning as remote from plain English as “delivered to the warden of a prison” — or whatever else might be held in the future to fit today’s announced “rationale . . . that the appellant has no control over delays,” ante, at 273.
The Court seeks to have it both ways, at one and the same time abandoning a unitary interpretation of “filed” for purposes of the present decision, yet purporting “not [to] disturb” the many cases stating that a notice of appeal is filed when received, “[t]o the extent these cases state the general rule.” Ante, at 274. See, e. g., Parissi v. Telechron, Inc., 349 U. S. 46, 47 (1955) (holding that timely receipt satisfies 28 U. S. C. §2107 ); United States v. Lombardo, 241 U. S. 73, 76 (1916) (“A paper is filed when it is delivered to the proper official and by him received and filed”); Haney v. Mizell Memorial Hospital, 744 F. 2d 1467, 1472 (CA11 1984); In re LBL Sports Center, Inc., 684 F. 2d 410, 413 (CA6 1982); In re Robinson, 640 F. 2d 737, 738 (CA5 1981); In re Ramsey, 612 F. 2d 1220 , 1223 (CA9 1980); In re Bad Bubba Racing Products, Inc., 609 F. 2d 815 , 816 (CA5 1980); Ward v. Atlantic Coast Line R. Co., 265 F. 2d 75, 80 (CA5 1959), rev’d on other grounds, 362 U. S. 396 (1960); Allen v. Schnuckle, 253 F. 2d 195, 197 (CA9 1958). It seems to me that to leave them undisturbed only “to the extent [they] state the general rule’ is to disturb them profoundly. The rationale of today’s decision is that any of various theoretically possible meanings *281 of “filed with the clerk” may be adopted — even one as remote as “addressed to the clerk and given to the warden” — depending upon what equity requires. It may turn out that we will not often agree that equity requires anything other than “received by the clerk,” but parties will often argue it, and the lower courts will sometimes hold it. Thus is wasteful litigation in our appellate courts multiplied.
Petitioner Prentiss Houston’s notice of appeal in this case was stamped received 31 days after the District Court’s judgment was entered — that is, one day after the expiration of the 30-day filing period set out in Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 4(a)(1). Since there is no legal warrant for creating a special exception to the rule of receipt for the benefit of incarcerated pro se appellants, I cannot join the Court in reversing the judgment on that basis.
II
Petitoner advanced several additional arguments supporting reversal which the Court did not have to reach. Ante, at 276-277, n. 4. I must consider them, and, having done so, find that none of them has merit-
First, petitioner asserts that his untimeliness in filing his notice of appeal should be excused because he “did all he could under the circumstances,” as required by Fallen v. United States, 378 U. S. 139, 144 (1964). This argument fails because there is no warrant for equitable tolling of filing deadlines in the civil context of this habeas proceeding as there was in the criminal context that was at issue in Fallen . The bar erected by § 2107 in civil cases is jurisdictional, and this Court is without power to waive it, ho matter what the equities of a particular case. As noted above, this is made explicit in Rule 26(b) of the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure. In Fallen , by contrast, there was no jurisdictional statute at issue, and the relevant Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 2 provided that a “just determination” should be achieved. See 378 U. S., at 142 .
*282 Second, petitioner maintains that he was lulled into thinking that his appeal was timely by the issuance of a certificate of probable cause and briefing schedule, and thus did not move for an extension of time within the 30-day grace period, see Fed. Rule App. Proc. 4(a)(5). This, he suggests, constitutes a “unique circumstance” of the sort recognized in Harris Truck Lines, Inc. v. Cherry Meat Packers, Inc., 371 U. S. 215, 217 (1962); Thompson v. INS, 375 U. S. 384, 387 (1964); and Wolfsohn v. Hankin, 376 U. S. 203 (1964). Petitioner asserts that those cases establish an equitable doctrine that sometimes permits the late filing of notices of appeal. Our later cases, however, effectively repudiate the Harris Truck Lines approach, affirming that the timely filing of a notice of appeal is “mandatory and jurisdictional.” Griggs v. Provident Consumer Discount Co., 459 U. S. 56, 58, 61 (1982); see also Browder v. Director, Dept. of Corrections of Illinois, 434 U. S. 257 (1978). As we observed in United States v. Locke, 471 U. S. 84, 100-101 (1985):
“Filing deadlines, like statutes of limitations, necessarily operate harshly and arbitrarily with respect to individuals who fall just on the other side of them, but if the concept of a filing deadline is to have any content, the deadline must be enforced. ‘Any less rigid standard would risk encouraging a lax attitude toward filing dates,’ United States v. Boyle, 469 U. S. [241,] 249 [(1985)]. A filing deadline cannot be complied with, substantially or otherwise, by filing late — even by one day.”
Finally, petitioner asserts that his notice of appeal should be treated as a motion for extension of time under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 4(a)(5). That Rule, however, was specifically amended to require that a motion must be filed with the district court to obtain an extension, and its text precludes treating a late filed notice as being a motion. As revised, the Rule explicitly states:
*283 “The district court, upon a showing of excusable neglect or good cause, may extend the time for filing a notice of appeal upon motion filed not later than 30 days after the expiration of the time prescribed by this Rule 4(a)” (emphasis added).
The Advisory Committee’s Notes on Appellate Rule 4(a)(5) explain:
“Under the present rule there is a possible implication that prior to the time the initial appeal time has run, the district court may extend the time on the basis of an informal application. The amendment would require that the application must be made by motion, though the motion may be made ex parte. After the expiration of the initial time a motion for the extension of the time must be made in compliance with the F. R. C. P. and local rules of the district court.” 28 U. S. C. App., p. 469.
The courts below were therefore without power to treat petitioner’s late filed notice of appeal as a motion for extension of time under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 4(a)(5).
* * *
Twenty-four years ago Justice Clark, joined by Justices Harlan, Stewart, and White, said in the dissent in Thompson :
“Rules of procedure are a necessary part of an orderly system of justice. Their efficacy, however, depends upon the willingness of the courts to enforce them according to their terms. Changes in rules whose inflexibility has turned out to work hardship should be effected by the process of amendment, not by ad hoc relaxations by this Court in particular cases. Such dispensations in the long run actually produce mischievous results, undermining the certainty of the rules and causing confusion among the lower courts and the bar.” 375 U. S., at 390 .
*284 That could not be more correct, nor more applicable to the present case. The filing rule the Court supports today seems to me a good one, but it is fully within our power to adopt it by an amendment of the Rules. Doing so instead in the present fashion, not only evades the statutory requirement that changes be placed before Congress so that it may reject them by legislation before they become effective, 28 U. S. C. §2072 , but destroys the most important characteristic of filing requirements, which is the certainty of their application. It is hard to understand why the Court felt the need to short-circuit the orderly process of rule amendment in order to provide immediate relief in the present case. Petitioner delivered his notice of appeal to the'warden three days before it was due to be filed with the Clerk. It would have been imprudent even to place it in a mailbox with the deadline so close at hand.
For the reasons stated, I respectfully dissent.

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Source: Frix Law Library, https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9431403. Public record. Not legal advice.