Page:Ivan Eberhart v. United States.pdf/3

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Cite as: 546 U. S. ____ (2005)
3

Per Curiam

(quoting United States v. Washington, 184 F. 3d 653, 659 (CA7 1999)).

The Court of Appeals did, however, express some misgiving. After describing the holding of Kontrick, it commented that "[t]he reasoning of Kontrick may suggest that Rule 33's time limits are merely inflexible claim-processing rules that could be forfeited if not timely asserted." 388 F. 3d, at 1049. It concluded, however, that even if Kontrick had undermined Robinson and Smith, "we are bound to follow them until expressly overruled by the Supreme Court." 388 F. 3d, at 1049 (citing Agostini v. Felton, 521 U. S. 203, 237 (1997)).

II

In Kontrick, we determined that defenses made available by the time limitations of Federal Rules of Bankruptcy Procedure 4004 and 9006 may be forfeited. 540 U. S., at 458–460. They are not "jurisdiction[al]," but are instead "claim-processing rules," that may be "unalterable on a party's application" but "can nonetheless be forfeited if the party asserting the rule waits too long to raise the point." Id., at 456. In Kontrick, the debtor responded on the merits to a creditor's untimely objection to his discharge. He did not raise the untimeliness issue, and the court resolved the merits in favor of the creditor. On motion for reconsideration and on appeal, the debtor raised the argument that Rules 4004 and 9006 "have the same import as provisions governing subject-matter jurisdiction." Id., at 455. We rejected this assertion and found that the debtor had forfeited the timeliness argument.

The Rules we construed in Kontrick closely parallel those at issue here. Like a defendant wishing to move for a new trial under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 33, a creditor wishing to object to a debtor's discharge in Chapter 7 liquidation proceedings has a set period of time to file with the court (measured, in the latter context, from