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HOHN v. UNITED STATES

Opinion of the Court

decision of an Article III court.
In light of the constitu-
tional questions which would surround such an arrangement,
see Gordon, supra; Hayburn’s Case, 2 Dall. 409 (1792), we
should avoid any such implication.

We further disagree with the contention, advanced by the
dissent and by Court-appointed amicus, that a request to
proceed before a court of appeals should be regarded as a
threshold inquiry separate from the merits which, if denied,
prevents the case from ever being in the court of appeals.
Precedent forecloses this argument.
In Ex parte Quirin,
317 U. S. 1 (1942), we confronted the analogous question
whether a request for leave to ﬁle a petition for a writ of
habeas corpus was a case in a district court for the purposes
of the then-extant statute governing court of appeals review
of district court decisions. See 28 U. S. C. § 225(a) First
(1940 ed.) (courts of appeals had jurisdiction to review ﬁnal
decisions “[i]n the district courts, in all cases save where a
direct review of the decision may be had in the Supreme
Court”). We held the request for leave constituted a case in
the district court over which the court of appeals could as-
sert jurisdiction, even though the district court had denied
the request. We reasoned, “[p]resentation of the petition
for judicial action is the institution of a suit. Hence the de-
nial by the district court of leave to ﬁle the petitions in these
causes was the judicial determination of a case or contro-
versy, reviewable on appeal to the Court of Appeals.”
317
U. S., at 24.

We reached a similar conclusion in Nixon v. Fitzgerald.
There President Nixon sought to appeal an interlocutory
District Court order rejecting his claim of absolute immu-
nity. The Court of Appeals summarily dismissed the appeal
because, in its view, the order failed to present a “serious
and unsettled question” of law sufﬁcient to bring the case
within the collateral order doctrine announced in Cohen v.
Beneﬁcial Industrial Loan Corp., 337 U. S. 541, 547 (1949).
Because the Court of Appeals had dismissed for failure to