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Full-Text Articles in Law

Institutional Competence And Civil Rules Interpretation, Lumen N. Mulligan, Glen Staszewski Jan 2016

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

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No abstract provided.


The Supreme Court’S Regulation Of Civil Procedure: Lessons From Administrative Law, Lumen N. Mulligan, Glen Staszewski Jun 2012

The Supreme Court’S Regulation Of Civil Procedure: Lessons From Administrative Law, Lumen N. Mulligan, Glen Staszewski

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In this Article, we argue that the Supreme Court should route most Federal Rules of Civil Procedure issues through the notice-and-comment rulemaking process of the Civil Rules Advisory Committee instead of issuing judgments in adjudications, unless the case can be resolved solely through the deployment of traditional tools of statutory construction. While we are not the first to express a preference for rulemaking on civil procedure issues, we advance the position in four significant ways. First, we argue that the Supreme Court in the civil procedure arena is vested with powers analogous to most administrative agencies. Second, building upon this …


Clear Rules - Not Necessarily Simple Or Accessible Ones, Lumen N. Mulligan Jan 2011

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

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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 …


Jurisdiction By Cross-Reference, Lumen N. Mulligan Jan 2011

Jurisdiction By Cross-Reference, Lumen N. Mulligan

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State and federal law often cross-reference each other to provide a rule of decision. The difficulties attendant to these cross-referenced schemes are brought to the fore most clearly when a federal court must determine whether such bodies of law create federal question jurisdiction. Indeed, the federal courts have issued scores of seemingly inconsistent opinions on these cross-referential cases. In this article, I offer an ordering principle for these apparently varied, cross-referential, jurisdictional cases. I argue that the federal courts only take federal question jurisdiction over cross-referenced claims when they, from a departmental perspective, maintain declaratory authority over the cross-referenced law. …


Did The Madisonian Compromise Survive Detention At Guantanamo?, Lumen N. Mulligan May 2010

Did The Madisonian Compromise Survive Detention At Guantanamo?, Lumen N. Mulligan

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In this essay, I take up the Court’s less heralded second holding in Boumediene v. Bush - that a federal habeas court must have the institutional capacity to find facts, which in Boumediene itself meant that a federal district court must be available to the petitioners. Although this has gone largely unnoticed, I contend that this holding is inconsistent with the Madisonian Compromise - the standard view that the Constitution does not require jurisdiction in any federal court, except the Supreme Court. In fact, it appears that the Court adopted Justice Story’s position that the Constitution requires vesting of jurisdiction …


Federal Courts Not Federal Tribunals, Lumen N. Mulligan Jan 2010

Federal Courts Not Federal Tribunals, Lumen N. Mulligan

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The Court has employed inferred-cause-of-action doctrine to foster the rights of individuals, from injured workers to female college applicants to defrauded investors and targets of racial discrimination. Although the question of whether the federal courts ought to infer causes of action from federal statutes is an old chestnut in the federal-courts field, a new basis for barring such a practice has arisen, requiring fresh attention to the Court's inferred-cause-of-action doctrine. This new position asserts that inferring a cause of action is not merely poor judicial policy but extra-jurisdictional under either 28 U.S.C. - 1331 or Article III. Borrowing a phrase …


A Unified Theory Of 28 U.S.C. Section 1331 Jurisdiction, Lumen N. Mulligan Nov 2008

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

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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 …