36
Opinion of the Court
rejects that central tenet of interpretation, that a statute is to be considered in all its parts when construing any one of them. To emphasize that § 1407(b) says nothing about the Panel's obligation when addressing a transferee court's powers is simply to ignore the necessary consequence of self-assignment by a transferee court: it conclusively thwarts the Panel's capacity to obey the unconditional command of § 1407(a).
A like use of blinders underlies the Circuit majority's conclusion that the Panel was not even authorized to remand the case under its Rule 14(c), the terms of which condition the remand responsibility on a suggestion of the transferee court, a motion filed directly with the Panel, or the Panel's sua sponte decision to remand. None of these conditions was fulfilled, according to the Court of Appeals, which particularly faulted Lexecon for failing to file a remand motion directly with the Panel, as distinct from the transferee court.1 This analysis, too, is unpersuasive; it just ignores the fact that the statute places an obligation on the Panel to
1 The Ninth Circuit stopped short of expressly inferring a waiver from Lexecon's failure to file a motion for remand directly with the Panel, and any inference of waiver would surely have been unsound. Although the Panel's Rule 14(c)(i) does authorize a party to file such a motion, Rule 14(d) comes close to saying that only under extraordinary circumstances will such a motion be granted without a suggestion of remand by the transferee court. (The Rule reads: "The Panel is reluctant to order remand absent a suggestion of remand from the transferee district court.") Therefore, even if a party may waive the § 1407 remand requirement by failing to request remand from the transferor court, see 28 U. S. C. § 1406(b), Rule 14(d) precludes an inference of waiver from mere failure to request remand from the Panel.
In this case, moreover, one can say categorically that a motion before the Panel would have failed; the transferee court denied Lexecon's motion for a remand suggestion simultaneously with an order assigning the case to itself for trial, thus exercising the authority that the Panel's Rule 14(b) expressly purported to recognize. Under the Panel's own rules, in sum, Lexecon never had a chance to waive a thing.
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