Denial Of Stay Relief 'Forms A Discrete Procedural Unit' That Must Be Immediately Appealed

On January 14, 2020, in a 9-0 ruling, the United States Supreme Court held that a creditor's failure to appeal a stay relief denial within 14 days of the order's entry renders the appeal untimely under 28 U.S.C. § 158(c)(2) and Fed. R. Bankr. P. 8002(a).1 The parties' dispute began as a Tennessee state court breach of contract action filed by Ritzen Group, Inc., the creditor and appellant, against Jackson Masonry, LLC, the debtor and appellee. To avoid a state court sanctions hearing, Jackson Masonry, LLC filed for bankruptcy relief under Chapter 11. Ritzen Group, Inc. filed a motion for relief from the automatic stay and argued that the debtor filed in bad faith. The bankruptcy court denied the motion. The creditor next filed a proof of claim, which the bankruptcy court eventually denied. The creditor then appealed to the United States District Court both the stay relief denial and the claim denial. The District Court rejected the stay relief appeal as untimely because it was filed more than 14 days after entry of the order. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals concluded likewise and affirmed. The creditor then appealed to the United States Supreme Court.

In a unanimous opinion delivered by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court applied the key inquiry from Bullard v. Blue Hills Bank,2 being how to define the immediately appealable proceeding. Reminding the parties that bankruptcy isn't like ordinary litigation, Justice Ginsburg described the bankruptcy arena as an "aggregation of individual controversies" that at times cannot await resolution of an entire bankruptcy case. Rather, when a bankruptcy ruling "definitively dispose[s] of discrete disputes within an overarching...