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Full-Text Articles in Law
"Plausible Cause": Explanatory Standards In The Age Of Powerful Machines, Kiel Brennan-Marquez
"Plausible Cause": Explanatory Standards In The Age Of Powerful Machines, Kiel Brennan-Marquez
Vanderbilt Law Review
Much scholarship in law and political science has long understood the U.S. Supreme Court to be the "apex" court in the federal judicial system, and so to relate hierarchically to "lower" federal courts. On that top-down view, exemplified by the work of Alexander Bickel and many subsequent scholars, the Court is the principal, and lower federal courts are its faithful agents. Other scholarship takes a bottom-up approach, viewing lower federal courts as faithless agents or analyzing the "percolation" of issues in those courts before the Court decides. This Article identifies circumstances in which the relationship between the Court and other …
The Jurisdiction Canon, Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl
The Jurisdiction Canon, Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl
Vanderbilt Law Review
This Article concerns the interpretation of jurisdictional statutes. The fundamental postulate of the law of the federal courts is that the federal courts are courts of limited subject-matter jurisdiction. That principle is reinforced by a canon of statutory interpretation according to which statutes conferring federal subject-matter jurisdiction are to be construed narrowly, with ambiguities resolved against the availability of federal jurisdiction. This interpretive canon is over a century old and has been recited in thousands of federal cases, but its future has become uncertain. The Supreme Court recently stated that the canon does not apply to many of today's most …