188
Ginsburg, J., dissenting
tional law raised by [ICS] have never been decided by Illinois appellate courts." Ibid. Land-use cases generally, and landmark designations particularly, implicate "local policies" and "local concerns." Ibid. Yet all this Court is willing to say is that "the District Court properly exercised federal question jurisdiction over the federal claims in ICS' complaints, and properly recognized that it could thus also exercise supplemental jurisdiction over ICS' state law claims." Ante, at 166. The Court's opinion expresses "no [further] view." Ante, at 174.
The District Court disposed of ICS's federal equal protection and due process claims in less than 13 pages of its 63-page opinion, App. to Pet. for Cert. 33a-46a, and then devoted over 40 pages more to the state-law claims. Id., at 46a-89a. That court wrote at greatest length on whether the Landmarks Commission's conclusions were "Against the Manifest Weight of the Evidence." Id., at 73a-89a. Finally, the District Court "affirm[ed] the Commission's decisions." Id., at 89a. It would have been in order for this Court to have recalled, in face of the District Court's federal-claims-first approach, the "fundamental rule of judicial restraint" that federal courts "will not reach constitutional questions in advance of the necessity of deciding them." Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold Reservation v. Wold Engineering, P. C., 467 U. S. 138, 157 (1984). As a rule, potentially dispositive state-law challenges, not ultimate constitutional questions, should be cleared first. See, e. g., Hagans v. Lavine, 415 U. S. 528, 546-547 (1974).
When local official actions are contested on state and federal grounds, and particularly when construction of a state measure or local ordinance is at issue, the state questions stand at the threshold. In this case, for example, had ICS's construction of the Landmarks Ordinance prevailed, no federal constitutional question would have ripened. The Court does note that § 1367(c) "enumerat[es] the circumstances in which district courts can refuse [to] exercise [supplemental
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