PER CURIAM.
After a rash of murders in the state prison at Walpole, Massachusetts, prison officials began an investigation. When an imminent newspaper story threatened the investigation’s secrecy, the officials decided to act swiftly. They seized several inmates suspected of participating in the murders and placed them in a segregation unit, where they could not be harmed or cause harm to others. See Mass. Gen’l Laws Ann. ch. 127 § 39; cf. id. § 40. Believing this to be a violation of due process, the district court ordered the officials to give the segregated inmates notice of the charges against them within two days and to begin disciplinary hearings within nine days. We stayed the district court’s order.
We now must decide whether the inmates have a “liberty interest” sufficient to invoke federal guarantees of procedural due process. The inmates and the court below relied only on state law as the source of the necessary interest. The standard to be applied to such a claim is whether the inmates have “some right or justifiable expectation rooted in state law that [they] will not be transferred except for misbehavior or upon the occurrence of other specified events.” Montanye v. Haymes, 427 U.S. 236, 242, 96 S.Ct. 2543, 2547, 49 L.Ed.2d 466 (1976). We have it on commanding authority that no Massachusetts statute creates such a right or expectation. Meachum v. Fano, 427 U.S. 215, 96 S.Ct. 2532, 49 L.Ed.2d 451 (1976). Transfers to segregation units are within the Commissioner’s broad statutory discretion. Mass. Gen’l Laws Ann. ch. 127 § 39. The district court, however, relied on recent prison regulations, which, it believed, severely restrict the discretion of prison officials to order transfers in the absence of misconduct. But this circuit has recently held that the present prison regulations dealing with reclassification do not impose substantive standards on the decision to transfer an inmate. Lombardo v. Meac-hum, 548 F.2d 13 (1977). Freedom from transfer is not a “liberty interest” since an inmate may be transferred at the whim of the Commissioner. Because no “liberty interest” has been infringed by the transfer, due process does not attach, and the district court’s order cannot stand.
Reversed.
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.