Opinion ID: 210069
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: jurisdiction

Text: The panel majority calls its further discovery jurisdictional discovery, in its relation to the ownership of the Barstow inventions and patents. It is hard to predict what may evolve from further discovery, which may adduce information about the conception and development of these inventions by Dr. Barstow and his brother, during and after Dr. Barstow's employment, as well as additional evidence concerning Schlumberger's contemporaneous negation of both interest and rights in these inventions. The circumstances surrounding the sale to MBLAM may also be informative. These are not matters of jurisdiction, but of the merits of the ultimate questions. The Court has commented on the trend to conflation of jurisdiction and merits. In Steel Co. v. Citizens for a Better Environment, 523 U.S. 83, 89, 118 S.Ct. 1003, 140 L.Ed.2d 210 (1998) the Court explained: It is firmly established in our cases that the absence of a valid (as opposed to arguable) cause of action does not implicate subject-matter jurisdiction, i.e., the court's statutory or constitutional power to adjudicate the case. (emphasis in original). The Court criticized what it called drive-by jurisdictional rulings where there is subject matter jurisdiction but an underlying fact is in dispute. Id. This criticism aptly fits the majority's designation of its remand as jurisdictional discovery. As the Court explained in Arbaugh v. Y & H Corp., 546 U.S. 500, 126 S.Ct. 1235, 163 L.Ed.2d 1097 (2006): A plaintiff properly invokes § 1331 jurisdiction when she pleads a colorable claim `arising under' the Constitution or laws of the United States. 546 U.S. at 513, 126 S.Ct. 1235. In Arbaugh the Court referred to the subject-matter jurisdiction/ingredient-of-claim-for-relief dichotomy and observed that a dismissal for lack of jurisdiction when some threshold fact has not been established results in an unrefined disposition known as drive-by jurisdiction. Id. at 511, 126 S.Ct. 1235. As in Arbaugh, the issues before us are not jurisdictional; they are of the merits. Indeed, the extensive authority throughout the regional circuits is footnoted in the majority opinion at n. 3, but ignored, starting with the case of Autery v. United States, 424 F.3d 944, 956 (9th cir.2005) (whether jurisdictional issue and substantive claims are so intertwined that resolution of the jurisdictional question is dependent on factual issues going to the merits) (internal citation omitted).