and that the district court therefore erred when it submitted the question to the jury. Had Urantia Foundation preserved this argument for appeal, and were the classification question actually settled in its favor, Urantia Foundation would be entitled to a de novo review on the question of whether The Urantia Book is a commissioned or a composite work, rather than the more deferential standard appropriate to review of a district court’s denial of a renewed motion for judgment as a matter of law. Urantia Foundation has, however, waived any such argument, and we therefore need not reach the unsettled question of whether initial classification of works is, in all cases, a question of law for the court.
In the district court, Urantia Foundation’s attorneys drafted proposed jury instructions and participated in a conference at which the parties agreed with the court upon—or preserved objections to—the jury instructions. They were present when the district court read the instructions to the jury. At none of these points did Urantia Foundation object to the submission of the classification question to the jury. The portion of the transcript of the instructions conference relevant to “Instruction Number 23, Work for Hire/Commissioned Work” suggests just the opposite; Urantia Foundation’s counsel clearly contemplated submission of the question to the jury. The same is true of portion of the transcript relevant to “Instruction Number 26, Composite Definition.”
Urantia Foundation’s oral Rule 50(a) motion at the close of evidence for judgment as a matter of law did not mention the issue.[1] We find Urantia Foundation’s only allusion to this argument below in its brief in support of its Rule 50(b) renewed motion: a single, undeveloped sentence in the brief reads, “Whether The Urantia Book is a commissioned work is a question of law subject to de novo review.” This sentence serves—confusingly—as the topic sentence of a paragraph attacking the sufficiency of the evidence submitted to the jury, not the propriety of submitting the question to the jury in the first place. Neither Michael Foundation nor the district court appear to have responded to this sentence, or, indeed, to have in any way discerned the question-of-law argument.
We have consistently held that a movant’s renewed motion under Rule 50(b) may not advance new legal arguments; i.e., the renewed motion’s scope is restricted to issues developed in the initial motion. Our decision in Vanderhurst v. Colorado Mountain College District, 208 F.3d 908 (10th Cir.2000), is instructive. In that case, following a jury trial at which the movant did not object to the submission of an issue to the jury, the movant sought on appeal to argue that the issue was properly one of law for the court alone. We declined to consider the argument, and stated that:
This court generally will not entertain arguments on appeal which the appellant failed to raise before the district court. More specifically, “[a Rule 50] motion for judgment as a matter of law made at the close of all the evidence preserves for review only those grounds specified at the time, and no others.” Finally, Rule 51 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure states, “No party may assign as error the giving or the failure to give an instruction unless that party objects thereto before the jury retires to consider its verdict, stating distinctly the
- ↑ In fact, in the course of his oral motion, Urantia Foundation’s attorney stated, “As to the unified nature of the work, I think there’s certainly a fact issue for the jury to decide on that at a minimum.”
