Law Commons^™

The Federal Question Jurisdiction Under Article Iii: “First In The Minds Of The Framers,” But Today, Perhaps, Falling Short Of The Framers’ Expectations, Arthur D. Hellman

Articles

As Chief Justice Marshall explained, “the primary motive” for creating a “judicial department” for the new national government was “the desire of having a [national] tribunal for the decision of all national questions.” Thus, although Article III of the Constitution lists nine kinds of “Cases” and “Controversies” to which the “judicial Power” of the United States “shall extend,” “the objects which stood first in the minds of the framers” were the cases “arising under” the Constitution, laws, and treaties of the United States. Today we refer to this as the federal question jurisdiction.

Of all federal question cases, the Framers …

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 …

Do Seven Members Of Congress Have Article Iii Standing To Sue The Executive Branch?: Why The D.C. Circuit’S Divided Decision In Maloney V. Murphy Was Wrongly Decided In Light Of Two Prior District Court Decisions And Historical Separation Of Powers Jurisprudence, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

The D.C. Circuit’s divided decision in Maloney v. Murphy granting standing to minority party members of the House Oversight Committee appears questionable in light of two prior district court decisions in Waxman and Cummings that had denied standing in similar circumstances. Most importantly, Maloney is inconsistent with Supreme Court precedent regarding standing for individual members of Congress. In Raines v. Byrd, the Supreme Court held that individual members of Congress generally do not have standing to enforce institutional congressional interests such as whether a statute is constitutional, but that one or both Houses of Congress must sue as an institution. …

The Constitutionality Of Nationwide Injunctions, Alan M. Trammell

Scholarly Articles

Opponents of nationwide injunctions have advanced cogent reasons why courts should be skeptical of this sweeping remedy, but one of the arguments is a red herring: the constitutional objection. This Essay focuses on the narrow question of whether the Article III judicial power prohibits nationwide injunctions. It doesn’t.

This Essay confronts and dispels the two most plausible arguments that nationwide injunctions run afoul of Article III. First, it shows that standing jurisprudence does not actually speak to the scope-of-remedy questions that nationwide injunctions present. Second, it demonstrates that the Article III judicial power is not narrowly defined in terms of …

Standing For Nothing, Robert Mikos

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

A growing number of courts and commentators have suggested that states have Article III standing to protect state law. Proponents of such "protective" standing argue that states must be given access to federal court whenever their laws are threatened. Absent such access, they claim, many state laws might prove toothless, thereby undermining the value of the states in our federal system. Furthermore, proponents insist that this form of special solicitude is very limited-that it opens the doors to the federal courthouses a crack but does not swing them wide open. This Essay, however, contests both of these claims, and thus, …

State Standing In United States V. Texas: Opening The Floodgates To States Challenging The Federal Government Or Proper Federalism?, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In United States v. Texas, the Supreme Court by an equally divided vote, 4 to 4, affirmed the decision of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that the State of Texas had Article III standing to challenge in federal court the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) directive establishing a Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (“DAPA”) program to grant lawful immigration status to millions of undocumented immigrants. A serious question is whether state standing in this case will open the floodgates to allow states to challenge virtually every federal executive action. On the other hand, …

“Government By Injunction,” Legal Elites, And The Making Of The Modern Federal Courts, Kristin Collins

Faculty Scholarship

The tendency of legal discourse to obscure the processes by which social and political forces shape the law’s development is well known, but the field of federal courts in American constitutional law may provide a particularly clear example of this phenomenon. According to conventional accounts, Congress’s authority to regulate the lower federal courts’ “jurisdiction”—generally understood to include their power to issue injunctions— has been a durable feature of American constitutional law since the founding. By contrast, the story I tell in this essay is one of change. During the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, many jurists considered the federal …

“Spooky Action At A Distance”: Intangible Injury In Fact In The Information Age, Seth F. Kreimer

All Faculty Scholarship

Two decades after Justice Douglas coined “injury in fact” as the token of admission to federal court under Article III, Justice Scalia sealed it into the constitutional canon in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife. In the two decades since Lujan, Justice Scalia has thrown increasingly pointed barbs at the permissive standing doctrine of the Warren Court, maintaining it is founded on impermissible recognition of “Psychic Injury.” Justice Scalia and his acolytes take the position that Article III requires a tough minded, common sense and practical approach. Injuries in fact must be "tangible" "direct" "concrete" "de facto" realities in time and …

Does A House Of Congress Have Standing Over Appropriations?: The House Of Representatives Challenges The Affordable Care Act, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In U.S. House of Representatives v. Sylvia Matthews Burwell, the District Court for D.C. in 2015 held that the House of Representatives has Article III standing to challenge certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act as violations of the Constitution’s Appropriations Clause. The Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on legislative standing is complicated. The Court has generally avoided the contentious question of whether Congress has standing to challenge certain presidential actions because of the difficult separation-of-powers concerns in such cases. In Raines v. Byrd, the Court held that individual members of Congress generally do not have Article III standing by simply holding …

Spelling Out Spokeo, Craig Konnoth, Seth F. Kreimer

All Faculty Scholarship

For almost five decades, the injury-in-fact requirement has been a mainstay of Article III standing doctrine. Critics have attacked the requirement as incoherent and unduly malleable. But the Supreme Court has continued to announce “injury in fact” as the bedrock of justiciability. In Spokeo v. Robins, the Supreme Court confronted a high profile and recurrent conflict regarding the standing of plaintiffs claiming statutory damages. It clarified some matters, but remanded the case for final resolution. This Essay derives from the cryptic language of Spokeo a six stage process (complete with flowchart) that represents the Court’s current equilibrium. We put …

Data Breaches, Identity Theft And Article Iii Standing: Will The Supreme Court Resolve The Split In The Circuits, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In data breach cases, the lower federal courts have split on the question of whether the plaintiffs meet Article III standing requirements for injury and causation. In its 2013 decision Clapper v. Amnesty International USA, the Supreme Court, in a case involving alleged electronic surveillance by the U.S. government’s National Security Agency, declared that a plaintiff alleging that it will suffer future injuries from a defendant’s allegedly improper conduct must show that such injuries are “certainly impending.” Since the Clapper decision, a majority of the lower federal courts addressing “lost data” or potential identity theft cases in which there is …

Federalism, Diversity, Equality, And Article Iii Judges: Geography, Identity, And Bias, Sharon E. Rush

UF Law Faculty Publications

Each individual has a background, and that background shapes the individual’s views about life, creating an inevitable form of bias referred to as “experiential bias.” Experiential bias is shaped by many identity traits, including, among others, race, sex, sexual orientation, religion and even geography. The geographic identity of state judges and their potential unfair experiential bias is the common justification for federal court diversity jurisdiction. But experiential bias is inescapable, affecting everyone who's ever had an experience, and is generally not unfair, as demonstrated by most studies regarding the "fairness" justification for diversity jurisdiction. More recently, Justice O’Connor connected racial …

Universities As Constitutional Law Makers (And Other Hidden Actors In Our Constitutional Orders), Adam J. Macleod

Faculty Articles

In the stories told by opinion makers and many law professors, American constitutional law is concerned with two things-individual rights and the powers of government-and it is settled by the Court, which was established by Article III of our national Constitution. In those now-familiar tales, the United States Supreme Court creates constitutional law when heroic individuals assert their fundamental rights against an overreaching state and when Congress, state legislatures, and executive agencies are called upon to justify their expert enactments to an overreaching judiciary. To settle these constitutional disputes the Court looks either to the text of the written Constitution …

To The Victor Goes The Toil -- Remedies For Regulated Parties In Separation-Of-Powers Litigation, Kent H. Barnett

Scholarly Works

The U.S. Constitution imposes three key limits on the design of federal agencies. It constrains how agency officers are appointed, the extent of their independence from the President, and the range of issues that they can decide. Scholars have trumpeted the importance of these safeguards with soaring rhetoric. And the Supreme Court has permitted regulated parties to vindicate these safeguards through implied private rights of action under the Constitution. Regulated parties, for their part, have been successfully challenging agency structure with increased frequency. At the same time, regulated parties, courts, and scholars have largely ignored the practical question of “structural …

Advisory Adjudication, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Supreme Court decision in Camreta v. Greene is revealing. The Court first issues an opinion authorizing appeals by prevailing parties in qualified immunity cases, even though doing so entails the issuance of an advisory opinion that is not necessary to resolution of the dispute between the parties. And the Court then declines to reach the merits of the underlying constitutional claim in the case, because doing so would entail the issuance of an advisory opinion that was not necessary to the resolution of the dispute between the parties. The Court's decision, therefore, has the paradoxical effect of both honoring …

The Judicial Power And The Inferior Federal Courts: Exploring The Constitutional Vesting Thesis, A. Benjamin Spencer

Scholarly Articles

The third branch of our federal government has traditionally been viewed as the least of the three in terms of the scope of its power and authority. This view finds validation when one considers the extensive authority that Congress has been permitted to exercise over the Federal Judiciary. From the beginning, Congress has understood itself to possess the authority to limit the jurisdiction of inferior federal courts. The Supreme Court has acquiesced to this understanding of congressional authority without much thought or explanation.

It may be possible, however, to imagine a more robust vision of the Judicial Power through closer …

Cy Pres Relief And The Pathologies Of The Modern Class Action: A Normative And Empirical Analysis, Samantha Zyontz, Martin H. Redish, Peter Julian

Faculty Scholarship

Since the mid 1970s, federal courts have taken the doctrine of cy pres relief from the venerable law of trusts and adapted it for use in the modern class action proceeding. In its original context, cy pres was utilized as a means of judicially designating a charitable recipient when, for whatever reason, it was no longer possible to fulfill the original goal of the maker of the trust. The purpose of cy pres was to provide “the next best relief” by finding a recipient who would resemble the original donor’s recipient as much as possible. In the context of class …

Standing Still In The Roberts Court (Panel), Jonathan H. Adler

Faculty Publications

This Article, prepared for the Case Western Reserve Law Review symposium on “Access to the Courts in the Roberts Era,” offers a preliminary look at the standing jurisprudence of the Roberts Court. Contrary to claims made by some Court commentators, the Roberts Court has not tightened the requirements for Article III standing. To the contrary, insofar as the Roberts Court has altered the law of standing, it has made it easier for at least some litigants to pursue their claims in federal court. The Court’s decisions denying standing have largely reaffirmed prior holdings. By comparison, some of the Court’s decisions …

What's Left Standing? Feca Citizen Suits And The Battle For Judicial Review, Kimberly L. Wehle

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article discusses standing to sue the FEC with two principal objectives. First, it attempts to frame the doctrinal inconsistencies between Lujan and Akins that have given rise to ongoing FECA standing litigation and concludes that the Supreme Court should acknowledge its repudiation of Lujan in cases seeking election-related information. Second, it explores the question whether courts may be statutorily required to consider citizen challenges to FEC enforcement actions as a matter of justiciability theory in the first instance, and concludes that courts should turn to the oft-overlooked Akins decision in lieu of Lujan in reviewing suits brought under citizen-suit …

The State Secrets Privilege And Separation Of Powers, Amanda Frost

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Since September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has repeatedly invoked the state secrets privilege in cases challenging executive conduct in the war on terror, arguing that the very subject matter of these cases must be kept secret to protect national security. The executive's recent assertion of the privilege is unusual, in that it is seeking dismissal, pre-discovery, of all challenges to the legality of specific executive branch programs, rather than asking for limits on discovery in individual cases. This essay contends that the executive's assertion of the privilege is therefore akin to a claim that the courts lack jurisdiction to …

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 …

Some Effectual Power: The Quantity And Quality Of Decisionmaking Required Of Article Iii Courts, James S. Liebman, William F. Ryan

Faculty Scholarship

Did the Framers attempt to establish an effectual power in the national judiciary to void state law that is contrary tofederal law, yet permit Congress to decide whether or not to confer federal jurisdiction over cases arising under federal law? Does the Constitution, then, authorize its own destruction? This Article answers "yes" to the first question, and "no" to the second. Based on a new study of the meticulously negotiated compromises that produced the texts of Article HI and the Supremacy Clause, and a new synthesis of several classic Federal Courts cases, the Article shows that, by self-conscious constitutional design, …

Thomas's Supreme Unfitness--A Letter To The Senate On Advise And Consent, Gary J. Simson

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Role Of History In Constitutional Interpretation: A Case Study, Gary J. Simson

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.