Remand (court procedure)

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For other uses, see Remand.

The term remand may be used to describe an action by an appellate court in which it remands, or sends back, a case to the trial court or lower appellate court for action.

For example, if the trial judge committed a procedural error, failed to admit evidence or witnesses which the appellate court ruled should have been admitted, or ruled improperly on a litigant's motion, the appellate court may send the case back to the lower court for retrial or other action. ^[1]

A case is said to be "remanded" when the superior court returns or sends back the case to the lower court. Also, a court may be said to retry the case "on remand."

[edit] United States

The remand has options. It may be a full remand, essentially ordering an entirely new trial; it may be "with instructions" specifying, for example, that the lower court must consider certain alternatives or evidence not entertained at trial; or it may be a partial remand as when an appellate court affirms a conviction while directing the lower court to revisit the sentencing phase. When the appellate court concludes that the lower court's decision was not only wrong but prevented the lower court from reaching issues that must now be considered, it will usually remand the case to the lower court to consider those issues in the first instance rather than deciding them at the appellate level; when this action is taken, the appellate court will say that the lower court's decision is "reversed and remanded."

A variation on this usage occurs in the United States federal courts. When a civil case is filed in a state court in the United States, the defendant may, under certain circumstances, move the case to the local federal district court (this act is referred to as "removal"). The state court has no say in this decision, but if the federal court decides that the case was not one in which removal was permissible, it sends the case back to state court, and this action is termed a "remand." This use of "remand" is distinct from the meaning above, however, in that the federal court is not an appellate court above the state court, and in that this kind of remand does not imply that the state court did anything erroneous (since the decision whether removal is appropriate is not one over which the state court had any control in the first instance).