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premature requests are “related forward” to the first date on
which they could be made. The best known is Federal Rule of
Appellate Procedure 4(a), which requires a notice of appeal to be
filed “within 30 days after the judgment or order appealed from
is entered.” That rule was amended in 1979 to allow the relation
forward of prematurely filed appeals to the date of entry. Fed.
R. App. P. 4(a)(2).
The Advisory Committee Notes make clear, though, that even
before the 1979 amendment, such premature notices were effective.
Fed. R. App. P. 4(a)(2), 28 U.S.C. app. at 587 (2000). The
consensus view was that “unlike a tardy notice of appeal, certain
premature notices do not prejudice the appellee and that the
technical defect of prematurity therefore should not be allowed
to extinguish an otherwise proper appeal.” FirsTier Mortgage Co.
v. Investors Mortgage Ins. Co., 498 U.S. 269, 273 (1991). This
lenient reading of the rule’s language “was intended to protect
the unskilled litigant who files a notice of appeal from a
decision that he reasonably but mistakenly believes to be a final
judgment, while failing to file a notice of appeal from the
actual final judgment. Id. at 276.
An even closer analogy is rooted in section 6330 itself.
Section 6330(d)(1) governs the case of a taxpayer who appeals
from the Commissioner’s notice of determination after a CDP
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