This articles addresses the collateral order doctrine beginning with its inception in Cohen v. Beneficial Industrial Loan Corp., and continuing through an overview of theCourt\u27s civil collateral order jurisprudence illustrating the development of the requirements for attaining appellate review under the doctrine. It examines the role of important rights in the Court\u27s collateral order cases and attempts to determine whether importance is an additional requirement of the collateral order test. The author seeks to define what the Court means by an important right or issue, and to explain the view that some rights are sufficiently important to outweigh costs of piecemeal appeals. The author considers the unreviewability requirement of the collateral order doctrine, specifically what constitutes an unreviewable order under the doctrineand what, if anything, is the distinction between an unreviewable order and an order that leads to irreversible harm. Finally, the author examines the most recent casein which the Court discussed and applied the collateral order doctrine, Sell v. United States, contending that both the majority\u27s markedly broad reading and the dissent\u27s highly restrictive view of both the collateral order doctrine\u27s requirements and its application to pre-trial involuntary medication orders are inconsistent with and further complicate the Court\u27s prior collateral order jurisprudence. Finally, the author proposes a way that the collateral order doctrine could be applied in the involuntary medication setting while upholding the doctrine\u27s narrow application and furthering the policies behind the final judgment rule
