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The ideal of clear and simple jurisdictional rules seems like a no-brainer. Clarity in areas of subject-matter jurisdiction generally reduces the cost of litigating those issues and thus preserves litigant and judicial resources for the merits of a dispute. As a result, scholars and justices regularly promote the rhetoric of jurisdictional clarity. Yet no one has probed that rhetoric or reconciled it with the reality of subject-matter jurisdiction doctrine, which is anything but clear and simple. This Article begins to fill that gap, and, in the process, shifts the perspective of existing conversations between rules and standards and between mandates …

Federal jurisdiction—the “power” of the court—is seen as something separate and unique. As such, it has a litany of special effects that define jurisdictionality as the antipode of nonjurisdictionality. The resulting conceptualization is that jurisdictionality and nonjurisdictionality occupy mutually exclusive theoretical and doctrinal space. In a recent Article in Stanford Law Review, I refuted this rigid dichotomy of jurisdictionality and nonjurisdictionality by explaining that nonjurisdictional rules can be “hybridized” with any—or even all—of the attributes of jurisdictionality.

This Article drops the other shoe. Jurisdictional rules can be hybridized, too. Jurisdictional rules can be hybridized with nonjurisdictional features in myriad forms. …