Amendments to the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure. A brief guide to the December 2019 amendments

• Author: Steven Finell
• Pages: 1-7

Appellate Practice

Winter 2020, Vol. 39 No. 2

© 2019 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rig hts reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be

copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent

of the American Bar Association.

1

ARTICLES

March 05, 2020

Amendments to the Federal Rules of

Appellate Procedure

A brief guide to the December 2019 amendments.

By Steven Finell

Amendments to ten of the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure took effect on December 1,

2019. Another round of proposed amendments to the appellate rules was published for

public comment this summer; the comment period closed on February 19, 2020.

Amendments Effective December 1, 2019

The text of the amendments, a marked version pointing out the changes, the published

committee notes explaining each amendment, and a report explaining the amendments in

greater detail is available at https://www.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/2019-04-25-

congressional_rules_package_final_0.pdf.

Broader Disclosure of Interested Persons

The most important of the December 2019 amendments broaden the parties’ disclosure

requirements to help judges determine whether they should recuse themselves on the

ground that a judge owns an “interest that could be affected substantially by the outcome of

the proceeding.” Code of Judicial Conduct Canon 3(C)(1)(c) (2009). Some of these changes

were inspired by circuit rules that required disclosures in addition to what Appellate

Rule 26.1 already required.

Rule 26.1(a) previously required each party that was a nongovernmental corporation to

disclose parent corporations and publicly held corporations that own at least 10 percent of

the party’s stock. The amendment requires the same disclosure by a nongovernmental

corporation that seeks to intervene in an appeal.

A new Rule 26.1(b) requires the government, in a criminal case, to identify any

organization that is a victim of the alleged criminal activity, unless the government shows

good cause for not identifying the organization in a particular case. As an example of good

cause, the committee note posits a case in which there are many organizational victims, but