Cite as: 523 U. S. 1 (1998)
Opinion of the Court
longer affects legal rights does not present a case or controversy for appellate review." Ibid. Similarly, in Carafas v. LaVallee, we permitted an individual to continue his challenge to a criminal conviction only after identifying specific, concrete collateral consequences that attached to the conviction as a matter of law:
"It is clear that petitioner's cause is not moot. In consequence of his conviction, he cannot engage in certain businesses; he cannot serve as an official of a labor union for a specified period of time; he cannot vote in any election held in New York State; he cannot serve as a juror." 391 U. S., at 237 (footnotes and citation omitted).
See also Fiswick v. United States, 329 U. S. 211, 221-223 (1946) (conviction rendered petitioner liable to deportation and denial of naturalization, and ineligible to serve on a jury, vote, or hold office); United States v. Morgan, 346 U. S. 502 (1954) (conviction had been used to increase petitioner's current sentence under state recidivist law); Parker v. Ellis, 362 U. S. 574, 576 (1960) (Harlan, J., concurring) (since petition-er's other, unchallenged convictions took away the same civil rights as the conviction under challenge, the challenge was moot); Ginsberg v. New York, 390 U. S. 629, 633, n. 2 (1968) (conviction rendered petitioner liable to revocation of his license to operate luncheonette business). Cf. Tannenbaum v. New York, 388 U. S. 439 (1967) (per curiam); Jacobs v. New York, 388 U. S. 431 (1967) (per curiam).
The gateway to abandonment of this fastidious approach to collateral consequences was Pollard v. United States, 352 U. S. 354 (1957). There, in allowing a convict who had already served his time to challenge the length of his sentence, we said, almost offhandedly, that "[t]he possibility of consequences collateral to the imposition of sentence [was] sufficiently substantial to justify our dealing with the merits," id., at 358—citing for that possibility an earlier case involving consequences for an alien (which there is no reason to
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