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HOHN v. UNITED STATES

Opinion of the Court

828). Here we have a rule of procedure that does not alter
primary conduct. And what is more, the rule of procedure
announced in House v. Mayo has often been disregarded in
our own practice. Both Hohn and the United States cite
numerous instances in which we have granted writs of
certiorari to review denials of certiﬁcate applications with-
out requiring the petitioner to move for leave to ﬁle for an
extraordinary writ, as previously required by our rules, and
without requiring any extraordinary showing or exhibiting
any doubts about our jurisdiction to do so.
17 C. Wright, A.
Miller, & E. Cooper, Federal Practice and Procedure § 4036,
pp. 15–16 (2d ed. 1988) (collecting cases).
Included among
these examples are several noteworthy decisions which re-
solved signiﬁcant issues of federal law. See, e. g., Allen v.
Hardy, 478 U. S. 255, 257–258 (1986) (per curiam) (refusing
to permit retroactive application of Batson v. Kentucky, 476
U. S. 79 (1986), on collateral attack); Lynce v. Mathis, 519
U. S. 433, 436 (1997) (holding the cancellation of early release
credits violated the Ex Post Facto Clause). These devia-
tions have led litigants and the legal community to ques-
tion the vitality of the rule announced in House v. Mayo. As
commentators have observed: “More recent cases . . . have
regularly granted certiorari following denial of leave to
proceed in forma pauperis, or refusal to certify probable
cause, without any indication that review was by common
law writ rather than statutory certiorari. At least as to
these two questions, statutory certiorari should be avail-
able.” Wright, Miller, & Cooper, supra, at 15–16 (footnotes
omitted). Our frequent disregard for the rule announced in
House v. Mayo weakens the suggestion that Congress could
have placed signiﬁcant reliance on it, especially in light of
the commentary on our practice in the legal literature.

This is not to say opinions passing on jurisdictional issues
sub silentio may be said to have overruled an opinion ad-
dressing the issue directly. See, e. g., United States v. More,
3 Cranch 159, 172 (1805) (Marshall, C. J.). Our decisions re-