98
Opinion of the Court
Much more extensive defenses of the practice of deciding the cause of action before resolving Article III jurisdiction have been offered by the Courts of Appeals. They rely principally upon two cases of ours, Norton v. Mathews, 427 U. S. 524 (1976), and Secretary of Navy v. Avrech, 418 U. S. 676 (1974) (per curiam). Both are readily explained, we think, by their extraordinary procedural postures. In Norton, the case came to us on direct appeal from a three-judge District Court, and the jurisdictional question was whether the action was properly brought in that forum rather than in an ordinary district court. We declined to decide that jurisdictional question, because the merits question was decided in a companion case, Mathews v. Lucas, 427 U. S. 495 (1976), with the consequence that the jurisdictional question could have no effect on the outcome: If the three-judge court had been properly convened, we would have affirmed, and if not, we would have vacated and remanded for a fresh decree from which an appeal could be taken to the Court of Appeals, the outcome of which was foreordained by Lucas. Norton v. Mathews, supra, at 531. Thus, Norton did not use the pretermission of the jurisdictional question as a device for reaching a question of law that otherwise would have gone unaddressed. Moreover, the Court seems to have regarded the merits judgment that it entered on the basis of Lucas as equivalent to a jurisdictional dismissal for failure to present a substantial federal question. The Court said: "This disposition [Lucas] renders the merits in the present case a decided issue and thus one no longer substantial in the jurisdictional sense." 427 U. S., at 530-531. We think it clear that this peculiar case, involving a merits issue dispositively resolved in a companion case, was not meant to overrule, sub silentio, two centuries of jurisprudence affirming the necessity of determining jurisdiction before proceeding to the merits. See Clow, 948 F. 2d, at 627 (O'Scannlain, J., dissenting).
Avrech also involved an instance in which an intervening Supreme Court decision definitively answered the merits
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