Reyes-Garcia v. Rodriguez & Del Valle, Inc.

• Decision Date: 25 April 1996
• Docket Number: No. 95-1455,REYES-GARCIA,95-1455
• Citation: 82 F.3d 11
• Parties: Maria Del Carmen, et al., Plaintiffs, Appellees, v. RODRIGUEZ & DEL VALLE, INC., Defendant, Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit

Page 11

82 F.3d 11

34 Fed.R.Serv.3d 1092

Maria Del Carmen REYES-GARCIA, et al., Plaintiffs, Appellees, v. RODRIGUEZ & DEL VALLE, INC., Defendant, Appellant.

No. 95-1455.

United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit.

Submitted April 2, 1996.

Decided April 25, 1996.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico [Hon. Hector M. Laffitte, U.S. District Judge].

Virgilio Mendez Cuesta, Rio Piedras, on brief, for appellant.

Jose F. Quetglas Alvarez, Jose F. Quetglas Jordan and Eric M. Quetglas Jordan, Santurce, on brief, for appellees.

Before SELYA and CYR, Circuit Judges, and GERTNER, ^* District Judge.

SELYA, Circuit Judge.

Since appellate judges are not haruspices, they are unable to decide cases by reading goats' entrails. They instead must rely on lawyers and litigants to submit briefs that present suitably developed argumentation with appropriate citations to applicable precedents and to the record below. A party who honors the minimum standards of acceptable appellate advocacy only in the breach frustrates effective review and thereby jeopardizes its appeal. The case at bar is a paradigmatic example of a situation in which a party, by ignoring the rules, invites serious repercussions.

I

We sketch the underlying facts as best we can, resolving infrequent conflicts in favor of the jury verdict. See Cumpiano v. Banco Santander P.R., 902 F.2d 148, 151 (1st Cir.1990).

In 1987, defendant-appellant Rodriguez & Del Valle, Inc. (R & D), a general contractor, executed an agreement with a public agency, the Urban Renewal and Housing Corporation of Puerto Rico (the Corporation), to renovate several residential buildings in the Puerta de Tierra Housing Community, San Juan, Puerto Rico. Without obtaining the permission required by relevant regulations--or any other semblance of permission, for that matter--R & D levelled speed bumps on a road that provided entry into the Housing Community. Though flattening the protuberances facilitated access to the work site by R & D's vehicles and heavy machinery, the changed configuration also effectively converted the roadway into a drag strip for high-speed racing. Dismayed residents soon petitioned the municipality to reconstruct the speed bumps. The powers-that-be acquiesced and the municipality rebuilt the moguls (spacing them at their original fifty-foot intervals, rather than at the 100-foot intervals then mandated by applicable highway safety regulations). The drag-racing ceased and traffic slowed to a snail's pace.

R & D was not to be inconvenienced. It again levelled the speed bumps on its own authority. Not surprisingly, drag-racing resumed and the pace of traffic accelerated. When R & D finished the renovations limned by its contract, it departed the site without restoring the roadway to its original humpbacked condition. Residents alerted the authorities, warning that lives were at stake. After conducting an investigation, the municipality concluded that someone had best rebuild the speed bumps.

History teaches that at one point Rome burned while the Emperor fiddled. On September 18, 1990--while various parties (including R & D and the Corporation) were fencing over who had the responsibility to restore the speed bumps--a motorist named Jose Flores, travelling at high speed on the roadway, lost control of his automobile and struck plaintiff-appellee Maria del Carmen Reyes-Garcia (Reyes) as she stood on the sidewalk. The impact caused permanently debilitating injuries, including the severance of a limb.

Invoking diversity jurisdiction, 28 U.S.C. § 1332(a), the plaintiff, by then a citizen of New Jersey, sued several parties, including R & D, in the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico. ¹ At trial plaintiff advanced a golconda of tort theories against R & D, claiming inter alia that R & D had violated a highway safety regulation requiring contractors to seek permission from the municipality prior to removing speed bumps, and that R & D's conduct had transgressed the general duty of care owed under Puerto Rico law. See P.R.Laws Ann. tit. 31, § 5141 (1991) (providing for liability when a defendant "by an act or omission causes damage to another party through fault or negligence").

After a six-day trial, a jury found for the plaintiff and awarded her $700,000. It apportioned the damages 80% against the Corporation and 20% against R & D. The district court denied a variety of post-trial motions. R & D now appeals.

II

The appellant's submissions to this court are in utter disregard of the applicable procedural rules. It filed a nine-page opening brief that did not contain a table of contents, a list of legal authorities, a jurisdictional statement, a statement of the case, a precis of the issues presented for review, or a summary of the argument. The merits section of the brief lacked developed argumentation, eschewed any meaningful citations to pertinent legal authority, omitted particularized references to the record evidence, and did not discuss the applicable standard(s) of review. To cap matters, the appellant failed to prepare a record appendix. In short, the brief violated a whole series of requirements imposed by applicable procedural rules. See e.g., Fed.R.App.P. 28(a)(1)-(6), 28(e), & 30(a); 1st Cir.R. 28.2.

The plaintiff moved to dismiss the unleavened appeal. R & D responded in fits and starts. It filed two addenda to its opening brief (neither of which satisfactorily repaired the manifold defects in its original filings). Without consulting the plaintiff, see Fed.R.App.P. 30(b), R & D also prepared and filed a thirteen-page record appendix. This submission lacked vital excerpts from the trial record. It also lacked, among other things, an index, relevant docket entries, the notice of appeal, and the opinion of the district court denying the post-trial motions. The principal document in the appendix was in the Spanish language, without translation. These shortcomings violated the rules several times over. See, e.g., Fed.R.App.P. 30(a), (d); 1st Cir.R. 28.2 & 30.7.

III

Procedural rules are important for two overarching reasons. One reason is that rules ensure fairness and orderliness. They ensure fairness by providing litigants with a level playing field. They ensure orderliness by providing courts with a means for the efficient administration of crowded dockets. In both these respects rules facilitate the tri-cornered communications that link the opposing parties with each other and with the court.

The second overarching reason why procedural rules are important has a functional orientation: rules establish a framework that helps courts to assemble the raw material that is essential for forging enlightened decisions. In an appellate venue, for example, rules provide the mechanism by which the court, removed from the battlefield where the trial has been fought, gains the information that it requires to set the issues in context and pass upon them. When a party seeking appellate review fails to comply with the rules in one or more substantial respects, its failure thwarts this effort and deprives the appellate court of the basic tools that the judges of the court need to carry out this task. See Scarfo v. Cabletron Sys., Inc., 54 F.3d 931, 963 (1st Cir.1995); Moore v. Murphy, 47 F.3d 8, 10 (1st Cir.1995); Jardines Bacata, Ltd. v. Diaz-Marquez, 878 F.2d 1555, 1559 n. 5 (1st Cir.1989); Real v. Hogan, 828 F.2d 58, 60 (1st Cir.1987).

In this instance the second reason is of paramount importance. The deficiencies in the appellant's submissions are pervasive. They frustrate any reasonable attempt to understand its legal theories and to corroborate its factual averments. Canvassing the appellant's arguments illustrates the point.

The appellant's principal claim is that it enjoyed a privilege to remove the speed bumps because they were placed at shorter intervals than prescribed by the governing municipal regulation. This paralogism, however, is unsupported by any citation either to legal authority or to record evidence. Therefore, we must treat the argument as forfeited. See Ryan v. Royal Ins. Co., 916 F.2d 731, 734 (1st Cir.1990) ("It is settled in this circuit that issues adverted to on appeal in a perfunctory manner, unaccompanied by some developed argumentation, are deemed to have been abandoned."); United States v. Zannino, 895 F.2d 1, 17 (1st Cir.) (same), cert. denied, 494 U.S. 1082, 110 S.Ct. 1814, 108 L.Ed.2d 944 (1990); see also Fed.R.App.P. 28(a)(5) (explaining that an appellate "argument must contain the contentions of the appellant on the issues presented, and the reasons therefor, with citations to the authorities, statutes, and parts of the record relied on"). To make a bad situation worse, the argument is bereft of any indicium that it was seasonably advanced and properly preserved in the lower court.

The appellant's next asseveration is that the evidence does not support the jury verdict. Here, too, the appellant offers us no assurance that the necessary steps were taken below to preserve the point, and the fragmented record that it has produced does not afford any reliable way to tell. At any rate, the appellant furnishes no citations to the record in support of its rhetoric, but asks in effect that we take its rodomontade at face value. There is no justification for doing so.

The appellant's third argument implicates the refusal to order a remittitur. Federal law governs the question of whether the trial court should order a remittitur in a diversity case. See Blinzler v. Marriott Int'l, Inc., 81 F.3d 1148, 1161 (1st Cir.1996). Under federal law, appellate review of a trial court's refusal to trim a verdict is necessarily limited to whether the court abused its discretion in leaving the award intact. See, e.g., Ruiz v. Gonzalez Caraballo, 929 F.2d 31, 34 (1st Cir.1991); Wagenmann v. Adams, 829 F.2d 196, 215 (1st Cir.1987). Though bareboned, the record makes manifest the...