Hamer v. Neighborhood Housing Servs. of Chicago
The Supreme Court ruled that a federal appeals court was wrong to treat a filing-deadline extension limit as an unbendable jurisdictional rule, because that limit comes only from a court rule, not from a law passed by Congress.
The decision reinforces a key line the Court has drawn: only time limits written into a statute by Congress can strip an appeals court of the power to hear a case; limits created by court rules can be waived or forfeited if the other side doesn't object in time.
How it got here: The district court granted a two-month filing extension; the Seventh Circuit, acting on its own, later dismissed the appeal as untimely and jurisdictionally barred.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Charmaine Hamer sued her employer and a related company for age and employment discrimination. After the district court ruled against her, her lawyers withdrew and asked for extra time so she could find new counsel. The court gave her two extra months to file her appeal notice, even though a federal appellate rule caps such extensions at 30 days.
The question before the Court
When a court gave a losing party a two-month extension to file her appeal, far more than a federal rule allows, could the appeals court call the deadline itself an unbendable jurisdictional rule?
Why it matters
A woman who lost her discrimination lawsuit almost lost her chance to appeal entirely because a court rule's technical deadline was mistakenly treated as absolute. The ruling means that litigants nationwide won't automatically lose their appeals over rule-based deadline overruns if the opposing side never objected — those deadlines can be forfeited like other procedural rules.
What changes now
The case goes back to the Seventh Circuit, which must now decide the appeal on the merits rather than dismissing it as untimely. The Court explicitly left open several questions for the lower court to address on remand, including whether the opposing side forfeited any objection by not raising it earlier, whether they needed to file their own appeal to challenge the extension, and whether equitable exceptions might apply.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether the employer forfeited its objection to the overlong extension by not raising it earlier, whether the employer needed its own appeal to challenge the extension, or whether equitable exceptions could excuse the late filing — those questions go back to the lower court.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court began from a longstanding distinction: a filing deadline is 'jurisdictional' — meaning courts have no power to excuse missing it — only if Congress itself wrote the deadline into a statute. Deadlines that exist only in court-made rules are 'claim-processing rules,' which courts must enforce if raised in time but which can be forfeited if the other side never objects.
- The Court traced the relevant statute, 28 U.S.C. §2107(c), and found that while it sets a 14-day extension specifically for people who never received notice of judgment, it says nothing about how long an extension can run in ordinary cases like Hamer's.
- The 30-day cap that actually limited Hamer's extension comes only from Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 4(a)(5)(C), a court-made rule, not from the statute itself.
- Applying its rule of decision — that only time limits appearing in a statute governing the transfer of authority between courts count as jurisdictional — the Court concluded the Rule's 30-day cap is a claim-processing rule, not a jurisdictional bar.
- The Court explained that the Seventh Circuit had misread its earlier decision in Bowles v. Russell, which involved a deadline set by the statute itself, not by a court rule, so Bowles's 'mandatory and jurisdictional' language did not control here.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Distinguishes Bowles v. Russell (551 U. S. 205)
Bowles involved a deadline set by Congress itself, unlike the court-rule deadline here, so it doesn't control this case.