New Arguments Disallowed on Appeal

When you lose at trial, you may be tempted to raise any new argument you can think of on appeal. The desire to do so is natural but not permitted under the rules of appellate procedure. If you do not raise an argument at trial, then you waive that argument.

Court’s summary:

Civil case – ERISA. Neither ERISA nor the terms of the plan precluded defendant from calculating the plaintiffs’ opening cash balances using the 8% discount rate set out in Appendix A of the plan rather than the Internal Revenue Code statutory discount rate; as a result, the district court erred in awarding plaintiffs damages based on its holding that the IRC discount rate should have been used; plaintiffs’ cross-appeal issue on the date of the plan conversion was moot; argument concerning dismissal of plaintiff’s ERISA age discrimination claim was waived as their appeal presented an entirely new argument on the issue. (emphasis added)

Case Info

Sunder v. U.S. Bank Pension Plan
U.S. Court of Appeals Case Nos: 07-3485, 07-3593, 07-3771, 08-1910 and 08-2616
U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri – St. Louis
[PUBLISHED] [Hansen, Author, with Murphy and Bye, Circuit Judges]

Tags: appellate procedure

This entry was posted on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 2:03 am and is filed under appellate law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment below, or trackback from your own site.