Courts Commons^™

The Double Standard For Third-Party Standing: June Medical And The Continuation Of Disparate Standing Doctrine, Brandon L. Winchel

Notre Dame Law Review

No jurisdictional principle is more fundamental to the federal judiciary than the doctrine of standing. Before litigants may avail themselves of the tremendous power vested in the federal judiciary, plaintiffs must first establish that they are appropriately situated to assert a legal claim before a court. In analyzing whether a plaintiff possesses the requisite standing to maintain a legal challenge, the Supreme Court has stressed that a court’s analysis must be blind to the underlying dispute: “The fundamental aspect of standing is that it focuses on the party seeking to get his complaint before a federal court and not on …

The Judicial Reforms Of 1937, Barry Cushman

Journal Articles

The literature on reform of the federal courts in 1937 understandably focuses on the history and consequences of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ill-fated proposal to increase the membership of the Supreme Court. A series of decisions declaring various components of the New Deal unconstitutional had persuaded Roosevelt and some of his advisors that the best way out of the impasse was to enlarge the number of justiceships and to appoint to the new positions jurists who would be “dependable” supporters of the Administration’s program. Yet Roosevelt and congressional Democrats also were deeply troubled by what they perceived as judicial obstruction …

The Exceptional Role Of Courts In The Constitutional Order, N.W. Barber, Adrian Vermeule

Notre Dame Law Review

This Article looks at a rare part of the judicial role: those exceptional cases when the judge is called upon to pass judgment on the constitution itself. This arises in three groups of cases, roughly speaking. First, in exceptional cases the validity of the constitution and the legal order is thrown into dispute. Second, on some occasions the judge is asked to rule on the transition from one constitutional order to another. Third, there are some cases in which the health of the constitutional order requires the judge to act not merely beyond the law, as it were, but actually …

Revising Our “Common Intellectual Heritage”: Federal And State Courts In Our Federal System, Judith Resnik

Notre Dame Law Review

This Essay pays tribute to Daniel Meltzer’s insight that, to the extent “lawyers have a common intellectual heritage, the federal courts are its primary source.” I do so by analyzing how that heritage is made and remade, as political forces press Congress to deploy federal courts to protect a wide array of interests and state courts absorb the bulk of litigation. The heritage that Meltzer celebrated and to which he contributed was the outcome of twentieth-century social movements that focused on the federal courts as hospitable venues, serving as vivid sources of rights and remedies. A competing heritage has since …

Law Enforcement As Political Question, Zachary S. Price

Notre Dame Law Review

Across a range of contexts, federal courts have crafted doctrines that limit judicial secondguessing of executive nonenforcement decisions. Key case law, however, carries important ambiguities of scope and rationale. In particular, key decisions have combined rationales rooted in executive prerogative with concerns about nonenforcement’s “unsuitability” for judicial resolution. With one nonenforcement initiative now before the Supreme Court and other related issues percolating in lower courts, this Article makes the case for the latter rationale. Judicial review of nonenforcement, on this account, involves a form of political question, in the sense of the “political question doctrine”: while executive officials hold a …

The Rule Of Law And The Judicial Function In The World Today, Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain

Notre Dame Law Review

The world’s oldest written constitution still in effect has many inspiring lines, but perhaps the one that most stirs the souls of the patriotic appears in Article 30. Delineating a familiar separation of powers, that Article forbids the legislative, executive, and judicial branches from swapping or mixing functions. “[T]o that end”—and here’s the line—“it may be a government of laws and not of men.” John Adams, the author of that line and most of the rest of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, penned those words in 1779, eight years before the adoption of the second oldest written constitution …

The Origins Of Article Iii "Arising Under" Jurisdiction, Anthony J. Bellia

Journal Articles

Article III of the Constitution provides that the judicial Power of the United States extends to all cases arising under the Constitution, laws, and treaties of the United States. What the phrase arising under imports in Article III has long confounded courts and scholars. This Article examines the historical origins of Article III arising under jurisdiction. First, it describes English legal principles that governed the jurisdiction of courts of general and limited jurisdiction--principles that animated early American jurisprudence regarding the scope of arising under jurisdiction. Second, it explains how participants in the framing and ratification of the Constitution understood arising …

May A Federal Court Remand A Case To State Court After Federal Claims Have Been Deleted?, Joseph P. Bauer

Journal Articles

This Article provides a preview of Carnegie-Mellon University v. Honorable Maurice B. Cohill, Jr., argued before the Supreme Court of the United States on November 10, 1987. This case concerns the circumstances under which a lawsuit, properly commenced in a state court and then removed before trial to a federal court, may be sent back (remanded) to the state court.

On one level, this case seems only to involve technical interpretations of federal statutes governing procedure in the federal courts. At another level, however, it involves more general and important issues. Among these are how to allocate judicial power …

Withdrawing Jurisdiction From Federal Courts, Charles E. Rice

Journal Articles

Courts today accept two incorrect assumptions when interpreting the federal constitution. First, they assume that the judiciary is the sole branch with the definitive power in interpreting the Constitution. Second, they assume that the Supreme Court's decisions on constitutional interpretation are the law of the land and equal to the language of the Constitution itself. This Article proposes that Congress ought to exercise its removal power of appellate jurisdiction from the federal courts in certain areas of law to limit the Supreme Court’s power in creating law that expands the Constitution, which is mistakenly viewed today with equal stature as …

Congress And The Supreme Court's Jurisdiction, Charles E. Rice

Journal Articles

When a ruling of the supreme court meets with Congressional disfavor there are several remedies available to Congress. If the decision is not on a constitutional level, a later statutory enactment will suffice to reverse or modify the ruling. If, however, the Court's decision is an interpretation of a constitutional mandate, such as the requirement of the fourteenth amendment that legislative districts be apportioned according to population, then a statute could not reverse the decision because the statute itself would be subject to that constitutional mandate as defined by the Court.

The obvious method of reversing a Supreme Court interpretation …

World-Wide Volkswagen Corp. V. Woodson: Reflections On The Road Ahead, Kenneth F. Ripple, Mollie A. Murphy

Journal Articles

During its past several terms the Supreme Court of the United States has, after a long period of inactivity, engaged in a reexamination of the constitutional limitations on state court jurisdiction. Last term, in World-Wide Volkswagen Corp. v. Woodson, this reexamination reached a new plateau. Woodson significantly elucidated the constitutional policy considerations underlying this area. Yet, as so often occurs in constitutional litigation, the resolution of old doubts has also brought into sharper focus other yet unresolved issues.

This article has two purposes. First, it will assess the significance of Woodson in the overall doctrinal development of jurisdictional standards. Second, …