PER CURIAM:
Cross-appellees, eighteen New York State officials, appeal from a grant of summary judgment in favor of cross-appellant Association of American Medical Colleges (“AAMC”). Cross-appellees filed a timely notice of appeal stating
PLEASE TAKE NOTICE that the defendants in the above matter hereby appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, from the final order of judgment entered by the Court on February 13, 1990.
AAMC moves for an order dismissing the appeal for lack of jurisdiction on the ground that the notice of appeal failed to comply with the specificity requirements of Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 3(c) because it did not list the appealing parties individually. We deny the motion.
Rule 3(c) requires in relevant part that “[t]he notice of appeal shall specify the party or parties taking the appeal.” Although failure to name a party in a notice of appeal constitutes a failure of that party to appeal, see Torres v. Oakland Scavenger Co., 487 U.S. 312, 314, 108 S.Ct. 2405, 2407, 101 L.Ed.2d 285 (1988), such defect may be immaterial if the notice of appeal contains the “functional equivalent” of a listing of each appealing party’s name, see id. at 317, 108 S.Ct. at 2409. We hold that the phrase “the defendants in the above matter hereby appeal” was the functional equivalent of naming each and every defendant in this action. See Bay lis v. Marriott Corp., 906 F.2d 874 (2d Cir.1990) (holding that “the specification that the appeal was taken by ‘all of the plaintiffs in this action’ was the functional equivalent of a plaintiff-by-plaintiff listing”). The notice of appeal was thus sufficiently precise to fulfill the specificity requirement of Rule 3(c).
Motion denied.
What follows is an opinion from a United States Court of Appeals.
Intervenors who participated as parties at the courts of appeals should be counted as either appellants or respondents when it can be determined whose position they supported. For example, if there were two plaintiffs who lost in district court, appealed, and were joined by four intervenors who also asked the court of appeals to reverse the district court, the number of appellants should be coded as six.
In some cases there is some confusion over who should be listed as the appellant and who as the respondent. This confusion is primarily the result of the presence of multiple docket numbers consolidated into a single appeal that is disposed of by a single opinion. Most frequently, this occurs when there are cross appeals and/or when one litigant sued (or was sued by) multiple litigants that were originally filed in district court as separate actions. The coding rule followed in such cases should be to go strictly by the designation provided in the title of the case. The first person listed in the title as the appellant should be coded as the appellant even if they subsequently appeared in a second docket number as the respondent and regardless of who was characterized as the appellant in the opinion.
To clarify the coding conventions, consider the following hypothetical case in which the US Justice Department sues a labor union to strike down a racially discriminatory seniority system and the corporation (siding with the position of its union) simultaneously sues the government to get an injunction to block enforcement of the relevant civil rights law. From a district court decision that consolidated the two suits and declared the seniority system illegal but refused to impose financial penalties on the union, the corporation appeals and the government and union file cross appeals from the decision in the suit brought by the government. Assume the case was listed in the Federal Reporter as follows:
United States of America,
Plaintiff, Appellant
v
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendant, Appellee.
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendants, Cross-appellants
v
United States of America.
Widgets, Inc. & Susan Kuersten Sheehan, President & Chairman
of the Board
Plaintiff, Appellants,
v
United States of America,
Defendant, Appellee.
This case should be coded as follows:Appellant = United States, Respondents = International Brotherhood of Widget Workers Widgets, Inc., Total number of appellants = 1, Number of appellants that fall into the category "the federal government, its agencies, and officials" = 1, Total number of respondents = 3, Number of respondents that fall into the category "private business and its executives" = 2, Number of respondents that fall into the category "groups and associations" = 1.
Your task is to identify the state of the first listed state or local government agency that is an appellant.