Is Good Friday a Court Holiday? (2019 Edition)

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West front of the
Church of Notre Dame
Drawn by A. Pugin ;
engraved by J. Tingle.

You’ve calculated a deadline for a filing for Friday, April 19, 2019. That happens to be Good Friday. Is your filing due? It depends on if you’re in federal or state court.

Are you in a Florida state court? Then yes!

Good Friday is not one of the enumerated holidays in Florida Rule of Judicial Procedure 2.514(a)(6)(A) (.pdf) (defining “Legal Holiday”), but the rules also allow each clerk’s office or court’s chief judge to separately designate additional holidays. See Fla. R. Jud. P. 2.514(a)(6)(B) (defining a holiday as “any day observed as a holiday by the clerk’s office or as designated by the chief judge”). Using that latter rule, every Florida court has independently recognized Friday, April 19 as a Holiday in 2019 (and has historically closed on Good Friday, though you should check every year to be sure). So Happy Easter to those who celebrate!

Don’t just take our word for it, though. Here’s a handy list of links to each court’s holiday page:

Florida Appellate Courts

Florida Circuit Courts

Are you in federal court? Sorry to be the bearer of bad news…

Neither the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals nor the federal district courts of Florida close on Good Friday.

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This post is an update and expansion to our previous post,
https://floridaappellate.com/2014/04/18/is-good-friday-a-holiday-it-depends/.

If you want to get updates on court holidays and other appellate happenings, subscribe to this blog under the “FLORIDA APPELLATE PROCEDURE UPDATES BY EMAIL” in the right-hand column on this screen.

Briefing Deadlines Fixed

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A vintage image of a girl in a boat adorning a calendar from January 1920

The Appellate Rules Committee was not caught without a paddle and fixed a deadline glitch before January 1, 2019.

The Florida Supreme Court fixed briefing deadlines for cross-appeals and dependency and parental rights termination cases, effective January 1, 2019 at 12:03 am.

One of the biggest changes to the Appellate Rules this year is the counterbalancing of the deletion of 5 extra days for mailing with the lengthening of most appellate deadlines. Generally speaking, most deadlines that were formerly 5 days are now 10, for example, and the brief deadlines that used to be 20 days are now 30, and deadlines that used to be 10 days are now 15. You read that right — even though we’ve lost mailing days, we generally now have five or more additional days to serve most items. (Why or more? Because when the Court took away mailing days, it also gave a little extra boon of allowing you to start counting “on the next day that isn’t a “Saturday, Sunday, or Legal Holiday” rather than the next day, so you are no longer starting 3 days into your response time when you walk into your office on Monday morning to find something was filed after hours on Friday. We break down the new math in a prior blog post).

With all of those rule changes (three different orders!) something was bound to fall through the cracks. Under the October 25, 2018 orders, two appellate rules — Rules 9.146 and 9.210 — inadvertently kept the old, shorter deadlines. Luckly, the Appellate Rules Committee was on it, and moved the Florida Supreme Court for rehearing to fix the oversight. Rather than grant rehearing, the Court treated the motion as an “out of cycle report” from the committee, adopting the changes and making them in effect as 12:03am on January 1, 2019. See In re Amendments to Florida Rules of Appellate Procedure 9.146 & 9.210, No. SC18-1917, 43 Fla. L. Weekly S602 (Fla. Dec. 6, 2018)[.pdf]. Now cross appeal briefs have the same amount of time as initial and answer briefs, 30 days from service of the last brief. See Rule 9.210. And in dependency and termination of parental rights proceedings, practitioners also have the benefit of additional time (30 days for an answer and 15 days for a reply). See Rule 9.146.

The fully integrated .pdf rule set is now available on the Florida Bar’s website. Moreover, the fully integrated revised rules are also available at http://rules.floridaappellate.com.

New Rule 9.380 Allows Notification of Related Cases

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A public domain image of sketches of various courtroom scenes

Are these cases related?
If they are, now you can tell the appellate court.
Source: The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. Familiar scenes and faces in court. Retrieved from http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/9b51c6ed-b3d7-a26c-e040-e00a18061941


Among the many rule changes effective January 1, 2019, the Florida Supreme Court has created a new mechanism to notify an appellate court of related pending cases. New Rule 9.380 allows parties, without argument, to inform an appellate court of “related case or issue” that is either “arising out of the same proceeding in the lower tribunal,” or, helpfully, “involving a similar issue of law.”

How is this helpful to the appellate practitioner? If you are watching an issue develop and percolate in the trial courts or district courts, you can now notify the courts of other pending appeals or trial court decisions on the issue. Make note that this notice is not an opportunity to make additional argument: the rule expressly states that the notice “shall not contain argument.” Still, it’s a way to direct the courts to attempt uniformity in rulings.

Because there is no argument involved, the notice should follow the simple format of new Rule 9.900(k) [.pdf].