Law Commons^™

Amending The Exceptions Clause, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

Jurisdiction stripping is the new constitutional amendment, and the Exceptions Clause is the new Article V. But despite legal academia’s long-running obsessions with the meaning of constitutional amendment and the limits (if any) on Congress’s power to control federal jurisdiction, we still lack even a basic understanding of how these two forms of constitutional politicking interact. As legislators increasingly propose and pass jurisdiction-stripping legislation and pursue politically charged constitutional amendments, these constitutional processes have begun to step off of the pages of law reviews and into the halls of Congress. The looming collision between them makes it all the more …