Page:Wilkins v. United States (2023).pdf/2

Syllabus

litigation” that procedural rules often “seek to promote.” Henderson v. Shinseki, 562 U. S. 428, 435.

Given the risk of disruption and waste that accompanies the jurisdictional label, a procedural requirement will be construed as jurisdictional only if Congress “clearly states” that it is. Boechler v. Commissioner, 596 U. S. ___, ___. To determine whether the statutory text “plainly show[s] that Congress imbued a procedural bar with jurisdictional consequences,” courts apply “traditional tools of statutory construction.” United States v. Kwai Fun Wong, 575 U. S. 402, 410.

Section 2409a(g) lacks a jurisdictional clear statement, and nothing about §2409a(g)’s text or context gives reason to depart from this Court’s observation that “most time bars are nonjurisdictional.” Ibid. Section 2409a(g) states that an action “shall be barred unless it is commenced within twelve years of the date upon which it accrued.” This “text speaks only to a claim’s timeliness,” and its “mundane statute-of-limitations language say[s] only what every time bar, by definition, must: that after a certain time a claim is barred.” Ibid. Further, “[t]his Court has often explained that Congress’s separation of a filing deadline from a jurisdictional grant indicates that the time bar is not jurisdictional.” Id., at 411. Here, the Quiet Title Act’s jurisdictional grant is in §1346(f), well afield of §2409a(g). And “[n]othing [in §1346(f)] conditions the jurisdictional grant on the limitations perio[d in §2409a(g)] or otherwise links those separate provisions.” Id., at 412. Pp. 3–5.

(b) None of the three decisions of this Court on which the Government relies—Block, 461 U. S. 273, United States v. Mottaz, 476 U. S. 834, and United States v. Beggerly, 524 U. S. 38—definitively interpreted §2409a(g) as jurisdictional. This Court has made clear that it will not undo a “definitive earlier interpretation” of a statutory provision as jurisdictional without due regard for the principles of stare decisis. John R. Sand & Gravel Co. v. United States, 552 U. S. 130, 138. Yet the mere fact that this Court previously described something as jurisdictional is not dispositive, as “[c]ourts, including this Court, have more than occasionally misused the term ‘jurisdictional’ to refer to nonjurisdictional prescriptions.” Fort Bend, 587 U. S., at ___–___, n. 4. To separate “definitive” interpretations of jurisdiction from those in which the term “jurisdictional” has been used imprecisely, the Court asks if a prior decision addressed whether a provision is “ ‘technically jurisdictional,’ ” i.e., whether it truly operates as a limit on a court’s subject-matter jurisdiction, and whether anything in the decision “turn[ed] on that characterization.” Arbaugh v. Y & H Corp., 546 U. S. 500, 512 (quoting Steel Co. v. Citizens for Better Environment, 523 U. S. 83, 91). A decision that simply states that “the court is dismiss-