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Reassessing The Purposes Of Federal Question Jurisdiction, John F. Preis

John F. Preis

For ages, judges and legal academics have claimed that federal question jurisdiction has three purposes: to provide litigants with a judge experienced in federal law, to protect litigants from state court hostility toward federal claims and to preserve uniformity in federal law. Because federal claims, for the most part, have always been cognizable in state courts, these purposes imply that state courts are less experienced, more hostile, and will adjudicate federal law in ways that decrease the uniformity of federal law. Despite the ongoing allegiance to this conception of federal question jurisdiction—and by implication, state court adjudication of federal questions—one …