As discussed (perhaps among other places) here, the Appellate Division has long frowned on attempts to file appeals as of right when there is in fact no final judgment on all issues as to all parties. Forty years ago today, the Appellate Division filed one of the leading opinions on that subject. Frantzen v. Howard, 132 N.J. Super. 226 (App. Div. 1975).
Frantzen was a municipal land use case in which the plaintiff had unsuccessfully sought a variance to build a home on an undersized lot. The plaintiff filed an appeal as of right from a Law Division decision that had denied the variance. But the Appellate Division’s per curiam opinion observed that “the record reveals that there remains unresolved by the trial court an important issue regarding the constitutionality of a relevant ordinance.” Thus, it was “manifest on this record that there has been no final judgment by disposition of al the litigated issues between the parties,” and the plaintiff therefore “had no right to appeal the adverse portions of the incomplete judgment without leave of this court.”
In language that would be frequently cited by later cases, the Appellate Division rejected “piecemeal reviews” as “anathema to our practice,” and condemned “interruption of the litigation at the trial level, by the taking, as here, of an unsanctioned ‘appeal,'” as disruptive of the entire judicial process and wasteful of judicial resources. The panel stated that if the respondents had moved timely to dismiss the appeal (a course of action that the Appellate Division continues to urge), that motion would have been granted. Accordingly, the court “conceive[d] it to be our obligation, on this record, to dismiss the appeal on our own motion.”