Law Commons^™

Supranational Diversity: Why Federal Courts Should Have Diversity Jurisdiction Over Cases Involving Supranational Organizations Like The European Union, John T. Dixon

Georgia Law Review

The federal diversity statute grants alienage jurisdiction
to "foreign citizens" and "foreign statutes," allowing them

to bring state-law claims against U.S. citizens in federal
'court. When the European Community (EC), an
intergovernmental organization of European states, sued
an American corporation for state-law violations, for the
first time a federal court had to determine whether the EC
qualified as a foreign state. The EC argued that it was
essentially a foreign state for the purposes of alienage
jurisdiction. Relying on the definition of foreign state in
the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 (FSIA),
which the diversity statute references, the court …

Asymmetrical Jurisdiction, Matthew I. Hall

Scholarly Works

Most people — and most lawyers — would assume that the U.S. Supreme Court has jurisdiction to review any determination of federal law by an inferior court, whether state or federal. And there was a time when it was so. But the Court’s recent justiciability decisions have created a perplexing jurisdictional gap — a set of cases in which state court determinations of federal law are immune from the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction. The Court has thus surrendered a portion of its supremacy and thereby undermined the policies that underlie its appellate jurisdiction.

In an effort to address this problem, …

To Defer Or Not To Defer: A Study Of Federal Circuit Court Deference To District Court Rulings On State Law, Dan T. Coenen

Scholarly Works

Federal courts of appeals often grant special deference to district court rulings on matters of state law. This practice is important. It is also ill-conceived. This Article explores this "rule of deference." Section I considers the roots and reach of the rule. Together with the Appendices to this Article, it seeks to detail for practitioners, commentators, and judges the way the rule operates in the courts. The remaining sections of this Article consider the wisdom of the rule of deference. Section II argues that the rule lacks a sound rationale and Section III urges that the rule has bad effects …