Page:Dupree v. Younger.pdf/8

6 Younger urges us to extend Ortiz’s holding to cover pure questions of law resolved in an order denying summary judgment. We decline the invitation.

While factual issues addressed in summary-judgment denials are unreviewable on appeal, the same is not true of purely legal issues—that is, issues that can be resolved without reference to any disputed facts. Trials wholly supplant pretrial factual rulings, but they leave pretrial legal rulings undisturbed. The point of a trial, after all, is not to hash out the law. Because a district court’s purely legal conclusions at summary judgment are not “supersede[d]” by later developments in the litigation, Ortiz, 562 U. S., at 184, these rulings follow the “general rule” and merge into the final judgment, at which point they are reviewable on appeal, Quackenbush, 517 U. S., at 712.

That difference explains why a summary-judgment motion is sufficient to preserve legal but not factual claims. As Ortiz explains, an appellate court’s review of factual challenges after a trial is rooted in the complete trial record, which means that a district court’s factual rulings based on the obsolete summary-judgment record are useless. A district court’s resolution of a pure question of law, by contrast, is unaffected by future developments in the case. From the reviewing court’s perspective, there is no benefit to having a district court reexamine a purely legal issue after trial, because nothing at trial will have given the district court any reason to question its prior analysis. We therefore hold that a post-trial motion under Rule 50 is not required to preserve for appellate review a purely legal issue resolved at summary judgment.

Younger’s counterarguments do not persuade us otherwise. First, he argues that under Ortiz, an order denying summary judgment is not a “final decision” under §1291