Appellate Waiver in Pennsylvania and its Effect on Litigants’ Rights to Appeal
Sarah Reeves * | 25.3 | Comment | Citation: Sarah Reeves, Comment, Appellate Waiver in Pennsylvania and its Effect on Litigants’ Rights to Appeal, 25 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 650 (2023).
This Comment will analyze how Pennsylvania courts are applying appellate waiver doctrine, and how excessive application of this doctrine is detrimentally impacting litigants’ exercise of their state constitutional right to appeal. Appellate courts have discretion to determine that litigants have waived their arguments if litigants do not strictly comply with a complicated morass of procedural and technical requirements legally necessary to preserve their arguments. While scholarly articles have engaged with the doctrine of appellate waiver, there is important empirical work that has not yet been done regarding the seemingly disproportionate use of the doctrine in Pennsylvania specifically. Ultimately, this Comment will use empirical findings to put forth three main arguments: (1) Pennsylvania appellate court judges are concluding that litigants have waived their appellate claims too frequently (and far more frequently than are the judges in other Third Circuit states); (2) the rigorous and overly formalistic rules of appellate procedure in Pennsylvania are contributing to the excessive number of cases finding that litigants have lost their rights to appeal; and (3) productive reform can be achieved through: arguing that Pennsylvania is infringing on the constitutional right to appeal, increased judicial restraint regarding the application of waiver doctrine, amendments to Pennsylvania’s formal waiver doctrine, and/or clearer instructions to Pennsylvania litigants regarding the steps they must take to preserve their claims.
While this Comment specifically focuses on the doctrine of appellate waiver in Pennsylvania, it also brings to light the possibility that many of the rights that we assume to be uniform across the states may actually mean quite different things in different jurisdictions. Thus, broadly speaking, there is a need for more deep empirical dives into the operation of state-to-state procedure in order to further uncover areas in which particular state practices and procedures might be creating obstacles to justice.
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* J.D., Class of 2023, University of Pennsylvania Law School. B.S., Cornell University, Class of 2020.