The spirit of existentialism spills into the byzantine labyrinth of “finality”, “implied severance” and “necessarily affects the final judgment” in appellate procedure. In Rivera v. Skanska USA Civ. Northeast, 2020 NY Slip Op 00094 (1st Dept. 2020), the First Department dismissed an appeal from an order issued prior to the final judgment, on the ground of finality, where the aggrieved party, presumably unaware of the morass behind the superficially innocuous term “non-final” in CPLR 5501(a)(1), waited to appeal the order from the final judgment rather than take an immediate appeal.

These three complex principles are interwoven. Background necessary to this review derives from the 2012 Report Prepared by the Committee on Civil Practice Law and Rules, Proposed Amendment to CPLR 5501, an Affirmative Legislative Proposal of the New York State Bar Association, which tracks their statutory and decisional trajectories.