Cite as: 540 U. S. 375 (2003)
Opinion of Scalia, J.
Justice Scalia, with whom Justice Thomas joins, concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.
I concur in Parts I and II of the Court's opinion and in the judgment of the Court. I also agree that this Court's consideration of Castro's challenge to the status of his re-characterized motion is neither barred by nor necessarily resolved by the doctrine of law of the case.
I write separately because I disagree with the Court's laissez-faire attitude toward recharacterization. The Court promulgates a new procedure to be followed if the district court desires the recharacterized motion to count against the pro se litigant as a first 28 U. S. C. § 2255 motion in later litigation. (This procedure, by the way, can be ignored with impunity by a court bent upon aiding pro se litigants at all costs; the only consequence will be that the litigants' later § 2255 submissions cannot be deemed "second or successive.") The Court does not, however, place any limits on when recharacterization may occur, but to the contrary treats it as a routine practice which may be employed "to avoid an unnecessary dismissal," "to avoid inappropriately stringent application of formal labeling requirements," or "to create a better correspondence between the substance of a pro se motion's claim and its underlying legal basis." Ante, at 381-382. The Court does not address whether Castro's motion filed under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 33 should have been recharacterized, and its discussion scrupulously avoids placing any limits on the circumstances in which district courts are permitted to recharacterize. That is particularly regrettable since the Court's new recharacterization procedure does not include an option for the pro se litigant to insist that the district court rule on his motion as filed; and gives scant indication of what might be a meritorious ground for contesting the recharacterization on appeal.
In my view, this approach gives too little regard to the exceptional nature of recharacterization within an adversar-
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