Law Commons^™

The Demise Of Hypothetical Jurisdiction In The Federal Courts, Scott C. Idleman

Vanderbilt Law Review

Recent years have witnessed a modest but expanding Supreme Court effort to return the national government to its structural first principles.' Foremost among these is that federal power, although vast, is neither inherent nor unbounded, but consists only of that granted by the Constitution. In 1998, the Court remained steadfast to this precept, thwarting yet another attempt by a federal branch to exceed its limited and enumerated constitutional powers. This time, however, the perpetrator was none other than the Article IH judiciary itself. In Steel Co. v. Citizens for a Better Environment, the Court formally denounced the federal court practice …

Equity -- 1961 Tennessee Survey (Ii), T. A. Smedley

Vanderbilt Law Review

During the current survey period, each of the higher Tennessee courts has been called upon to exercise its injunctive powers in significant and perplexing types of controversies. The court of appeals for the western section had to decide whether to take the risk of interfering in a bitter dispute between opposing factions of a church which had been torn by interfraternal strife for several years. In the middle section court of appeals an injunction was sought to restrain a store owner from operating his business under the name of a former manager of the store who had left this position …

Jurisdiction Of United States District Courts In Multiple-Claim Cases, Thomas F. Green Jr.

Vanderbilt Law Review

The jurisdictional problem peculiar to a case which involves more than one claim is: Shall the court entertain the entire action when it would have jurisdiction of one or more of the claims, but not all, if they were sued separately?' The application of this question to the United States district courts raises conflicting considerations. On the one hand is the fact that most of the claims which would not be within federal jurisdiction if sued alone, present questions of state rather than federal law. In general the more appropriate tribunals to deal with such questions in the first instance …

Jury Trial In Chancery Court In Tennessee, Frank C. Ingraham

Vanderbilt Law Review

Tennessee has since 1827 maintained, in some degree, a separate court of equity, presided over by a chancellor. Though most states have abolished the procedural distinction between cases in law and suits in equity, Tennessee still retains this dichotomy in its court system. Prior to 1827 law and equity were dispensed in Tennessee by a single court of general jurisdiction, the Superior Court of Law. This practice grew out of the North Carolina Act of 1782 and the continuation of that Act by the First Territorial Legislature in 1794, both of which gave equity jurisdiction to the Superior Court of …

Jurisdictional Amount In The Federal District Courts, William W. Hurst

Vanderbilt Law Review

In 1925, Judge Dobie, then professor of law at the University of Virginia, advanced a formula for determining the value of the matter in controversy in all federal question and diverse citizenship cases in the federal district courts. He called it a "plaintiff-viewpoint rule," and stated it thus: "The amount in controversy in the United States District Court is always to be determined by the value to the plaintiff of the right which he in good faith asserts in his pleading that sets forth the operative facts which constitute his cause of action."

Since then, the rule has received sanction …