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Jurisdiction‐Granting: Legislative Capacity And Ideological Distance, Seth W. Greenfest

Political Science Faculty Publications

This paper examines the conditions under which Congress passes jurisdiction-granting legislation, legislation that expands the discretion of the federal district courts by designating them as venues in which policy questions are to be heard. This project extends existing research that has demonstrated that Congress manipulates the parameters of jurisdiction by examining the manner in which Congress routinely engages in this activity. I construct and evaluate a comprehensive dataset of laws in which Congress grants jurisdiction to the district courts for the period between 1949 and 2000 with the goal of explaining conditions under which Congress grants jurisdiction Two explanations are …