Cite as: 516 U. S. 299 (1996)
Breyer, J., dissenting
States v. Ryan, 402 U. S. 530, 532-533 (1971); Cobbledick v. United States, 309 U. S., at 326-330; 15B Wright & Miller § 3914.23, at 140-155. But see United States v. Nixon, 418 U. S. 683, 691 (1974) (allowing President Nixon to appeal from a discovery order without first incurring a contempt citation, because "traditional contempt avenue to immediate appeal" would be "peculiarly inappropriate"). This "disobedience and contempt" requirement (somewhat analogous to a one-appeal limitation here) works, in part, because it "encourages reconsideration both by the party resisting discovery and by the party seeking discovery, and in part because it tends to limit appeals to issues that are both important and reasonably likely to lead to reversal." 15B Wright & Miller § 3914.23, at 154; see also Pennsylvania v. Ritchie, 480 U. S. 39, 50, n. 8 (1987) (disobedience and contempt procedure "rests on an implicit assumption that unless a party resisting discovery is willing to risk being held in contempt, the significance of his claim is insufficient to justify interrupting the ongoing proceedings").
It seems highly anomalous for the law to deny a routine interlocutory appeal where the Constitution of the United States protects an antidiscovery interest, but to permit a routine appeal where the legal doctrine of qualified immunity protects a similar interest. Yet, today's holding will either create just such an anomaly, or, as is more likely, it will generate many new interlocutory appeals as lower courts apply its principle wherever the Constitution, or other important legal doctrine, offers a litigant special anti-discovery protection.
The majority suggests that the importance of the anti-discovery interest protected by qualified immunity has already been "settled" by such precedents as Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U. S. 511 (1985), and Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U. S. 800 (1982). See ante, at 308. These cases do say that the qualified immunity defense, in its modern formulation,
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