Art. 2162.Dismissal By Consent of Parties, Or Because of Lack of Jurisdiction Or Right to Appeal, Or Abandonment; Transfer

Article 2162 gives four independent grounds for dismissing a Louisiana appeal, none of which requires waiting for briefing or argument to run its course. The parties can jointly agree to dismiss at any time. The appellate court can dismiss on its own conclusion that it lacks jurisdiction over the appeal. It can dismiss because no right to appeal exists at all, since the ruling being challenged might not be the kind of judgment the law lets a party appeal. And it can dismiss because the appeal has been abandoned under the rules the appellate court has adopted for that purpose.

That last ground, abandonment of the appeal, is worth separating from a similarly named concept that shows up earlier in Louisiana civil procedure: abandonment of the action under Article 561, which ends a lawsuit at the trial-court level when no party takes a step in its prosecution for three years. Abandonment of an appeal under Article 2162 is a distinct, appellate-stage concept, governed by whatever inactivity period the appellate court's own rules specify, a period Article 2165 confirms is set by those rules rather than by the Code itself.

Article 2162 also addresses what happens when an appeal lands in the wrong court. Rather than dismissing outright for lack of jurisdiction, the receiving court can transfer the appeal to the court that does have jurisdiction, on whatever terms and conditions it sets. And because appeals sometimes end up at the supreme court by mistake, the article gives the supreme court authority to transfer, or retransfer, a misdirected appeal to the proper court rather than leaving the parties to start over.