Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-1164_7li8.pdf
Page Number: 10

Cite as:  598 U. S. ____ (2023) 

7 

Opinion of the Court 

States.  Id., at 277.  It was only in the opinion’s conclusion 
that,  in  remanding,  the  Court  remarked  that  if  the  time 
limit  applied,  “the  courts  below  had  no  jurisdiction  to  in-
quire into the merits.”  Id., at 292.  The opinion contains no
discussion of whether the provision was “ ‘technically juris-
dictional’ ” or what in the case would have “turn[ed] on that
characterization.”  Arbaugh, 546 U. S., at 512 (quoting Steel 
Co., 523 U. S., at 91).  There is nothing more than an “un-
refined  dispositio[n]”  stating  that  a  “threshold  fact”  must 
“b[e] established” for there to be “jurisdiction.”  546 U. S., 
at 511 (internal quotation marks omitted).  This is a text-
book  “drive-by  jurisdictional  rulin[g]”  that  Arbaugh  held 
“should be accorded no precedential effect” as to whether a 
limit is jurisdictional.  Ibid. (internal quotation marks omit-
ted).

In  an  effort  to  endow  a  fleeting  statement  with  lasting 
significance, the Government and the dissent invoke histor-
ical context.  Block described the Act’s time limit as “a con-
dition on the waiver of sovereign immunity.”  461 U. S., at 
287.  Block never stated, however, that the Act’s time limit 
was  therefore  truly  a  limit  on  subject-matter  jurisdiction.
Yet according to the Government and the dissent, this went
without saying because the case law at the time was “un-
mistakably” clear that  conditions on waivers  of immunity 
were subject-matter jurisdictional.  Post, at 9. 

This reading is undermined by the very history on which 
it draws.  In Irwin v. Department of Veterans Affairs, 498 
U. S.  89  (1990),  the  Court  surveyed  the  case  law  about
whether “time limits in suits against the Government” are 
subject to “equitable tolling, waiver, and estoppel.”  Id., at 
94.  If associating time limits with waivers of sovereign im-
munity  clearly  made  those  limits  jurisdictional,  equitable 
exceptions would be just as clearly foreclosed.  Instead, Ir-
win described the Court’s approach to this question as “ad
hoc” and “unpredictab[le],” “leaving open” whether equita-
ble exceptions were available in any given case.  Id., at 94–