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HOHN v. UNITED STATES

Opinion of the Court

tive agency. Automobile Workers v. Scoﬁeld, 382 U. S. 205,
208–209 (1965); see also Izumi Seimitsu Kogyo Kabushiki
Kaisha v. U. S. Philips Corp., 510 U. S. 27, 30 (1993) (per
curiam). Together these decisions foreclose the proposition
that the failure to satisfy a threshold prerequisite for court
of appeals jurisdiction, such as the issuance of a certiﬁcate
of appealability, prevents a case from being in the court of
appeals for purposes of § 1254(1).

It would have made no difference had the Government de-
clined to oppose Hohn’s application for a certiﬁcate of appeal-
ability.
In Scoﬁeld, we held that § 1254(1) gave us jurisdic-
tion to review the Court of Appeals’ denial of a motion for
leave to intervene despite the fact that neither the agency
nor any of the other parties opposed intervention.
382 U. S.,
at 207.
In the same manner, petitions for certiorari to this
Court are often met with silence or even acquiescence; yet
no one would suggest this deprives the petitions of the ad-
versity needed to constitute a case. Assuming, of course,
the underlying action satisﬁes the other requisites of a case,
including injury in fact, the circumstance that the question
before the court is a preliminary issue, such as the denial of
a certiﬁcate of appealability or venue, does not oust appellate
courts of the jurisdiction to review a ruling on the matter.
For instance, a case does not lack adversity simply because
the remedy sought from a particular court is dismissal for
improper venue rather than resolution of the merits. Fed-
eral Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(3) speciﬁcally permits a
party to move to dismiss for improper venue before joining
issue on any substantive point through the ﬁling of a respon-
sive pleading, and we have long treated appeals of dismissals
for improper venue as cases in the courts of appeals, see,
e. g., Radzanower v. Touche Ross & Co., 426 U. S. 148, 151
(1976); Brunette Machine Works, Ltd. v. Kockum Industries,
Inc., 406 U. S. 706, 707 (1972); Schnell v. Peter Eckrich &
Sons, Inc., 365 U. S. 260, 261 (1961); Fourco Glass Co. v.
Transmirra Products Corp., 353 U. S. 222, 223 (1957); Mis-