Cite as: 523 U. S. 83 (1998)
Opinion of the Court
While some of the above cases must be acknowledged to have diluted the absolute purity of the rule that Article III jurisdiction is always an antecedent question, none of them even approaches approval of a doctrine of "hypothetical jurisdiction" that enables a court to resolve contested questions of law when its jurisdiction is in doubt. Hypothetical jurisdiction produces nothing more than a hypothetical judgment—which comes to the same thing as an advisory opinion, disapproved by this Court from the beginning. Muskrat v. United States, 219 U. S. 346, 362 (1911); Hayburn's Case, 2 Dall. 409 (1792). Much more than legal niceties are at stake here. The statutory and (especially) constitutional elements of jurisdiction are an essential ingredient of separation and equilibration of powers, restraining the courts from acting at certain times, and even restraining them from acting permanently regarding certain subjects. See United States v. Richardson, 418 U. S. 166, 179 (1974); Schlesinger v. Reservists Comm. to Stop the War, 418 U. S. 208, 227 (1974). For a court to pronounce upon the meaning or the constitutionality of a state or federal law when it has no juto state-law claims against a new party, because we agreed with the District Court's discretionary declination of pendent jurisdiction. Id., at 715- 716. Thus, the case decided not a merits question before a jurisdictional question, but a discretionary jurisdictional question before a nondiscretionary jurisdictional question. Similarly in Ellis v. Dyson, 421 U. S. 426, 436 (1975), the "authoritative ground of decision" upon which the District Court relied in lieu of determining whether there was a case or controversy was Younger abstention, which we have treated as jurisdictional. And finally, the issue pretermitted in Neese v. Southern R. Co., 350 U. S. 77 (1955) (per curiam), was not Article III jurisdiction at all, but the substantive question whether the Seventh Amendment permits an appellate court to review the district court's denial of a motion for new trial on the ground that the verdict was excessive. We declined to consider that question because we agreed with the District Court's decision to deny the motion on the facts in the record. The more numerous the look-alike-but-inapposite cases Justice Stevens cites, the more strikingly clear it becomes: His concurrence cannot identify a single opinion of ours deciding the merits before a disputed question of Article III jurisdiction.
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