Jurisprudence Commons^™

Let The Right Ones In: The Supreme Court's Changing Approach To Justiciability, Richard L. Heppner

Law Faculty Publications

The power of federal courts to act is circumscribed not only by the limits of subject matter jurisdiction, but also by various justiciability doctrines. Article III of the Constitution vests the judicial power of the United States in the Supreme Court and such inferior courts as Congress creates. That power is limited to deciding cases and controversies. It does not permit federal courts to provide advisory opinions when there is not a real dispute between the parties. Based on that constitutional limit, and related prudential concerns, the Court has developed a variety of justiciability requirements limiting which cases can be …

The Constitution As A Source Of Remedial Law, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In Equity’s Constitutional Source, Owen W. Gallogly argues that Article III is the source of a constitutional default rule for equitable remedies—specifically, that Article III’s vesting of the “judicial Power” “in Equity” empowers federal courts to afford the remedies traditionally afforded by the English Court of Chancery at the time of the Founding, and to develop such remedies in an incremental fashion. This Response questions the current plausibility of locating such a default rule in Article III, since remedies having their source in Article III would be available in federal but not state courts and would apply to state-law …

The Living Rules Of Evidence, G. Alexander Nunn

Faculty Scholarship

The jurisprudential evolution of evidence law is dead. At least, that’s what we’re expected to believe. Ushered in on the wings of a growing positivist movement, the enactment of the Federal Rules of Evidence purported to quell judicial authority over evidence law. Instead, committees, conferences, and members of Congress would regulate any change to our evidentiary regime, thereby capturing the evolution of evidence law in a single, transparent code.

The codification of evidence law, though, has proven problematic. The arrival of the Federal Rules of Evidence has given rise to a historically anomalous era of relative stagnation in the doctrinal …

The Aoc In The Age Of Covid - Pandemic Preparedness Planning In The Federal Courts, Zoe Niesel

Faculty Articles

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic created a crisis for American society—and the federal courts were not exempt. Court facilities came to a grinding halt, cases were postponed, and judiciary employees adopted work-from-home practices. Having court operations impacted by a pandemic was not a new phenomenon, but the size, scope, and technological lift of the COVID-19 pandemic was certainly unique.

Against this background, this Article examines the history and future of pandemic preparedness planning in the federal court system and seeks to capture some of the lessons learned from initial federal court transitions to pandemic operations in 2020. The Article begins by …

Supreme Silence And Precedential Pragmatism: King V. Burwell And Statutory Interpretation In The Federal Courts Of Appeals, Michael J. Cedrone

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article studies statutory interpretation as it is practiced in the federal courts of appeal. Much of the academic commentary in this field focuses on the Supreme Court, which skews the debate and unduly polarizes the field. This Article investigates more broadly by looking at the seventy-two federal appellate cases that cite King v. Burwell in the two years after the Court issued its decision. In deciding that the words “established by the State” encompass a federal program, the Court in King reached a pragmatic and practical result based on statutory scheme and purpose at a fairly high level of …

Aedpa As Forum Allocation: The Textual And Structural Case For Overruling Williams V. Taylor, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In Williams v. Taylor, the Supreme Court read a section of the Anti- Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) to change the long-prevailing de novo standard of review of federal habeas petitions by state prisoners. In holding that Congress had denied the lower federal courts the power to grant habeas relief to prisoners in custody pursuant to wrong but reasonable state court decisions, the Court departed from the provision’s text and relied instead on its perception of a generalized congressional purpose to cut back on habeas relief and on the non-redundancy canon of statutory construction. On both scores, …

Disbelief Doctrines, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Employment discrimination law is riddled with doctrines that tell courts to believe employers and not workers. Judges often use these disbelief doctrines to dismiss cases at the summary judgment stage. At times, judges even use them after a jury trial to justify nullifying jury verdicts in favor of workers.

This article brings together many disparate discrimination doctrines and shows how they function as disbelief doctrines, causing courts to believe employers and not workers. The strongest disbelief doctrines include the stray comments doctrine, the same decisionmaker inference, and the same protected class inference. However, these are not the only ones. Even …

Rethinking Criminal Contempt, John A.E. Pottow, Jason S. Levin

Articles

It is of course too early to tell whether we are in a new era of bankruptcy judge (dis)respectability. Only time will tell. But this Article performs a specific case study, on one discrete area of bankruptcy court authority, based upon a particular assumption in that regard. The assumption is this: certain high-salience judicial events-here, the recent Supreme Court bankruptcy judge decisions, coupled with earlier constitutional precedents involving the limits of Article III-can trigger overreaction and hysteria. Lower courts may read these Supreme Court decisions as calling into question the permissibility of certain bankruptcy court practices under the Constitution, and …

The Judicial Role In Constraining Presidential Non-Enforcement Discretion: The Virtues Of An Apa Approach, Daniel E. Walters

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars, lawyers, and, indeed, the public at large increasingly worry about what purposive presidential inaction in enforcing statutory programs means for the rule of law and how such discretionary inaction can fit within a constitutional structure that compels Presidents to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." Yet those who have recognized the problem have been hesitant to assign a role for the court in policing the constitutional limits they articulate, mostly because of the strain on judicial capacity that any formulation of Take Care Clause review would cause. In this Article, I argue that courts still can and …

Agenda-Setting In The Regulatory State: Theory And Evidence, Cary Coglianese, Daniel E. Walters

Faculty Scholarship

Government officials who run administrative agencies must make countless decisions every day about what issues and work to prioritize. These agenda-setting decisions hold enormous implications for the shape of law and public policy, but they have received remarkably little attention by either administrative law scholars or social scientists who study the bureaucracy. Existing research offers few insights about the institutions, norms, and inputs that shape and constrain agency discretion over their agendas or about the strategies that officials employ in choosing to elevate certain issues while putting others on the back burner. In this article, we advance the study of …

Institutional Competence And Civil Rules Interpretation, Lumen N. Mulligan, Glen Staszewski

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Gully And The Failure To Stake A 28 U.S.C. § 1331 'Claim', Lumen N. Mulligan

Faculty Works

In this piece, I argue that a return to Gully v. First National Bank in Meridian as an approach to 28 U.S.C. § 1331 jurisdiction is ill-conceived. In a recent thoughtful article, Professor Simona Grossi draws heavily upon the traditions of the legal process school’s approach to federal courts jurisprudence to support just such a resurrection of Gully as the lodestar for § 1331 doctrine. While embracing a return to the legal process school, I argue first that the Gully view — read as a call for judges simply to select sufficiently important matters, in relation to plaintiff’s case in …

A Realist Defense Of The Alien Tort Statute, Robert Knowles

Law Faculty Publications

This Article offers a new justification for modern litigation under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), a provision from the 1789 Judiciary Act that permits victims of human rights violations anywhere in the world to sue tortfeasors in U.S. courts. The ATS, moribund for nearly 200 years, has recently emerged as an important but controversial tool for the enforcement of human rights norms. “Realist” critics contend that ATS litigation exasperates U.S. allies and rivals, weakens efforts to combat terrorism, and threatens U.S. sovereignty by importing into our jurisprudence undemocratic international law norms. Defenders of the statute, largely because they do not …

Clear Rules - Not Necessarily Simple Or Accessible Ones, Lumen N. Mulligan

Faculty Works

In The Complexity of Jurisdictional Clarity, 97 VA. L. REV. 1 (2011), Professor Dodson argues that the traditional call for clear and simple rules über alles in subject matter jurisdiction is misplaced. In this response essay, I begin by arguing that Dodson, while offering many valuable insights, does not adequately distinguish between the separate notions of simplicity, clarity, and accessibility. Second, I note that crafting a clarity enhancing rule, even if complex and inaccessible, may be a more promising endeavor than the search for a regime that is at once clear, simple and accessible. In the third section, I contend …

In Search Of "Laissez-Faire Constitutionalism", Matthew Lindsay

All Faculty Scholarship

This article is a response to Professor Jed Shugerman’s Economic Crisis and the Rise of Judicial Elections and Judicial Review, HARVARD LAW REVIEW (2010). Professor Shugerman argues that the widespread adoption of judicial elections in the 1850’s and the embrace by the first generation of elected judges of countermajoritarian rationales for judicial review helped to effect a transition from the active, industry-building state of the early nineteenth century to the "laissez-faire constitutionalism" of the Lochner era. This response argues that Professor Shugerman overstates the causal relationship between the elected judiciary’s robust constitutional defense of "vested rights" and the iconic, if …

The Irrepressible Myth Of Klein, Howard M. Wasserman

Faculty Publications

The Reconstruction-era case of United States v. Klein remains the object of a “cult” among commentators and advocates, who see it as a powerful separation of powers precedent. In fact, Klein is a myth—actually two related myths. One is that it is opaque and meaninglessly indeterminate because, given its confusing and disjointed language, its precise doctrinal contours are indecipherable; the other is that Klein is vigorous precedent, likely to be used by a court to invalidate likely federal legislation. Close analysis of Klein, its progeny, and past scholarship uncovers three identifiable core limitations on congressional control over the workings of …

Aedpa, Saucier, And The Stronger Case For Rights-First Constitutional Adjudication, Stephen I. Vladeck

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

As part of a symposium on new affirmative visions of the judicial role, this essay takes on the Supreme Court's increasing unwillingness to resolve constitutional questions in post-conviction habeas cases under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), as seen in decisions such as Wright v. Van Patten, 128 S. Ct. 743 (2008). In most cases in which AEDPA applies, a petitioner is only eligible for relief if a state court's constitutional error was unreasonable based on prior Supreme Court decisions (and not dicta). As a result, the Court has repeatedly concluded that a state court did …

Jurisdiction's Noble Lie, Frederic M. Bloom

Publications

This Article makes sense of a lie. It shows how legal jurisdiction depends on a falsehood--and then explains why it would.

To make this novel argument, this Article starts where jurisdiction does. It recounts jurisdiction's foundations--its tests and motives, its histories and rules. It then seeks out jurisdictional reality, critically examining a side of jurisdiction we too often overlook. Legal jurisdiction may portray itself as fixed and unyielding, as natural as the force of gravity, and as stable as the firmest ground. But jurisdiction is in fact something different. It is a malleable legal invention that bears a false rigid …

Overvaluing Uniformity, Amanda Frost

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

"E NSURING the uniform interpretation of federal law has long been considered one of the federal courts' primary objectives, and uniformity is regularly cited in some of the most intractable debates about the structure and function of the federal court system. For example, specialized courts are lauded for their ability to ensure uniformity in the areas of law over which they have jurisdic- tion. Similarly, proponents of exclusive federal jurisdiction contend that the federal courts provide greater consistency in the interpre- tation of federal law than could fifty different state courts. Some commentators claim that Congress' power to create exceptions …

A Unified Theory Of 28 U.S.C. Section 1331 Jurisdiction, Lumen N. Mulligan

Faculty Works

Title 28, section 1331 of the United States Code provides the jurisdictional grounding for the majority of cases heard in the federal courts, yet it is not well understood. The predominant view holds that section 1331 doctrine both lacks a focus upon congressional intent and is internally inconsistent. I seek to counter both these assumptions by re-contextualizing the Court's section 1331 jurisprudence in terms of the contemporary judicial usage of right (i.e., clear, mandatory obligations capable of judicial enforcement) and cause of action (i.e., permission to vindicate a right in court). In conducting this reinterpretation, I argue that section 1331 …

Chief Judges: The Limits Of Attitudinal Theory And Possible Paradox Of Managerial Judging, Tracey E. George, Albert H. Yoon

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Chief judges wield power. Among other things, they control judicial assignments, circulate petitions to their colleagues, and manage internal requests and disputes. When exercising this power, do chiefs seek to serve as impartial court administrators or do they attempt to manufacture case outcomes that reflect their political beliefs? Because chiefs exercise their power almost entirely outside public view, no one knows. No one sees the chief judge change the composition of a panel before it is announced or delay consideration of a petition for en banc review or favor the requests of some colleagues while ignoring those of others. Chiefs …

Justice O'Connor And 'The Threat To Judicial Independence': The Cowgirl Who Cried Wolf?, Arthur D. Hellman

Articles

Sandra Day O'Connor retired from active service on the United States Supreme Court in early 2006. As her principal "retirement project," she has taken on the task of defending the independence of the judiciary. In speeches, op-ed articles, and public interviews, she has warned that "we must be ever vigilant against those who would strong-arm the judiciary into adopting their preferred policies." Justice O'Connor has done the nation a service by bringing the subject of judicial independence to center stage and by calling attention to the important values it serves. Unfortunately, however, in describing the threats to that independence, she …

Judicial Activism: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, Arthur D. Hellman

Articles

No matter how judges are selected, sooner or later some unfortunate candidate will be labeled a "judicial activist." One has to wonder: Does the term have any identifiable core meaning? Or is it just an all-purpose term of opprobrium, reflecting whatever brand of judicial behavior the speaker regards as particularly pernicious? Implicit in this question are several important issues about the role of courts in our democratic society.

I take my definition from Judge Richard Posner, who describes activist decisions as those that expand judicial power over other branches of the national government or over state governments. Unlike other uses …

Workable Antitrust Law: The Statutory Approach To Antitrust, Thomas Arthur

Faculty Articles

This Article will demonstrate the superiority of the statutory approach for producing more stable and consistent antitrust law. Part I details the development of the constitutional approach to antitrust, demonstrating how the rise of the pragmatic and instrumentalist view of law led to the displacement of the original statutory approach to antitrust. Part II illustrates that the constitutional approach fundamentally cannot produce workable antitrust law. It summarizes both the doctrinal disarray that continues to plague each major area of antitrust law and the irreconcilable policy prescriptions of the contending antitrust "schools." Part III presents an alternative, statutory approach to antitrust …

The Uses Of Human Rights Norms To Inform Constitutional Interpretation, Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Recent federal court of appeals decisions have relied on fundamental human rights norms to inform constitutional interpretation. This comment reviews the reasoning in those cases to identify possible constitutional uses of fundamental human rights norms and to suggest some conceptual framework for their use. The need for such a framework is illustrated by the cases themselves, which seem disparate and disjointed, with no discernible coherent philosophy, though each makes good sense when considered alone.

Recent Developments In The Law Of Search And Seizure, Jerold H. Israel

Book Chapters

This article is designed to provide a survey of recent decisions dealing with several important issues in the area of search and seizure. It is intended primarily as a basic collection of sources. I have, therefore, sought to keep my own commentary at a minimum and the citations to relevant cases at a maximum. Wherever space permits, I have let the courts speak for themselves. In most instances, however, it has been necessary to provide fairly general descriptions of the cases.