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Opinion of the Court
at 821-825.2 Moreover, the assumption of an actual-injury requirement seems to us implicit in the opinion's statement that "we encourage local experimentation" in various methods of assuring access to the courts. Id., at 832. One such experiment, for example, might replace libraries with some minimal access to legal advice and a system of court-provided forms such as those that contained the original complaints in two of the more significant inmate-initiated cases in recent years, Sandin v. Conner, 515 U. S. 472 (1995), and Hudson v. McMillian, 503 U. S. 1 (1992)—forms that asked the inmates to provide only the facts and not to attempt any legal analysis. We hardly think that what we meant by "experimenting" with such an alternative was simply announcing it, whereupon suit would immediately lie to declare it theoretically inadequate and bring the experiment to a close. We think we envisioned, instead, that the new
2 Justice Stevens suggests that Ex parte Hull, 312 U. S. 546 (1941), establishes that even a lost frivolous claim establishes standing to complain of a denial of access to courts, see post, at 408-409. As an initial matter, that is quite impossible, since standing was neither challenged nor discussed in that case, and we have repeatedly held that the existence of unaddressed jurisdictional defects has no precedential effect. See, e. g., Federal Election Comm'n v. NRA Political Victory Fund, 513 U. S. 88, 97 (1994); United States v. More, 3 Cranch 159, 172 (1805) (Marshall, C. J.) (statement at oral argument). On the merits, however, it is simply not true that the prisoner's claim in Hull was frivolous. We rejected it because it had been procedurally defaulted by, inter alia, failure to object at trial and failure to include a transcript with the petition, 312 U. S., at 551. If all procedurally defaulted claims were frivolous, Rule 11 business would be brisk indeed. Justice Stevens's assertion that "we held that the smuggled petition had insufficient merit even to require an answer from the State," post, at 408-409, is misleading. The attorney general of Michigan appeared in the case, and our opinion discussed the merits of the claim at some length, see 312 U. S., at 549-551. The posture of the case was such, however, that we treated the claim "as a motion for leave to file a petition for writ of habeas corpus," id., at 550; after analyzing petitioner's case, we found it "insufficient to compel an order requiring the warden to answer," id., at 551 (emphasis added). That is not remotely equivalent to finding that the underlying claim was frivolous.
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