Jurisdiction Commons^™

Winding Authority: Consent By Registration And The Legal Singularity, Christina Frohock

Articles

More than forty years ago, the Pennsylvania legislature enacted a uniquely broad and explicit statute directed at out-of-state corporations: registration as a foreign corporation constitutes consent to general personal jurisdiction in the Commonwealth. Pennsylvania's consent-by-registration statute has faced Fourteenth Amendment due process challenges in state and federal courts alike, rising all the way to both the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania and the U.S. Supreme Court. This Article first tracks the myriad challenges to the Pennsylvania statute, culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court's opinion in Mallory v. Norfolk Southern Railway Co. in 2023. The Article then argues that the statute's zigzagging …

"Then What?": A Framework For Life Without Chevron, Gary Lawson

UF Law Faculty Publications

The Supreme Court overruled Chevron in Loper Bright Enterprises, Inc. v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Dep’t of Commerce. What happens next? What should happen next?

This essay does not try to answer either of those important questions. Rather, it seeks to provide a framework to promote careful thinking about those questions. Specifically, any predictive or prescriptive account of the law governing judicial review of federal agency legal interpretations needs to think carefully about four issues.

First, what does “deference” actually mean in any given context? “Deference” can mean anything from polite respect to absolute obeisance, and everything in …

Federal Officer Criminal Case Removal, Jonathan R. Nash

Faculty Articles

Recent events have brought the federal officer removal statute to the fore. The statute allows a defendant to remove a criminal prosecution to federal court, provided that the allegedly criminal behavior was performed by the defendant as a federal officer under color of office and provided that the defendant has a federal defense. Current litigation has exposed several open, important questions under the statute, which this Article confronts. On the question of who qualifies as an “officer” who can remove under the statute, it argues that removal is available both to former officers and to presidents. On the question of …

The Reedy Creek Improvement District: A Comparative Analysis Underscoring The Problems In Hampering Special Districts, J. Patrick Moll

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

In 2022, the Florida legislature passed a bill that removed the administration of the Reedy Creek Improvement District, the special district governing the Walt Disney World Resort. The bill replaced it with the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District. Governor Ron DeSantis hailed this legislation as a success in reigning in a corporation operating with unchecked and unprecedented levels of governmental authority. Since its inception, however, the replacement administration has contended with claims of ethical violations, inefficiency, and unconstitutional enactment. Before the repeal of the Walt Disney World special district, special districts themselves were not often present in the Nation’s everyday …

Erie And Enforceability Of Forum Selection Clauses, Patrick Woolley

American University Law Review

Whether and to what extent state law governs the contractual validity of forum selection clauses in federal court remains highly contested. This Article argues for a two-part answer.

State law should govern whenever a party seeks a § 1404(a) transfer of venue within the federal judicial system. The Court has insisted that the choice-of-law rules of the state to which the suit is transferred govern when transfer is required by a contractually valid clause. That insistence accords with the Erie policy of vertical uniformity between state and federal courts only if the law of the state in which the transferring …

Personal Jurisdiction’S Aberrant Theory Of Consent, Roger Michalski

American University Law Review

Consent has been a pillar of personal jurisdiction doctrine at least since Pennoyer. The Supreme Court recently strengthened this pillar by deeming a corporate registration statute to constitute consent. Consent to submit to a court’s adjudicatory power can now be unintentional, based on inaction, is irrevocable, does not have to be informed, is all-or-nothing, and is blind to power inequalities. Failing to say “no” at the right time in the right way means “yes.”

Such a theory of consent clashes with what consent means elsewhere. In other contexts, we are reminded that “no means no,” the “absence of no does …

Is Federal Question Jurisdiction Arising Or Setting, Lumen N. Mulligan

Faculty Works

In this essay, I respond to Professor Arthur D. Hellman. Hellman argues that "there is reason to be concerned that the [federal] judicial system falls short of the Framers' expectations--primarily by denying many litigants in cases presenting federal questions 'their real day in an Article III court,' but also by fostering 'balkanization' rather than uniformity in the interpretation of federal law." It is a privilege to comment upon Hellman's thoughtful piece. In doing so, I begin by questioning the value of originalist interpretations of Article III jurisdiction both descriptively and normatively. I then turn to an intra-originalist critique that paints …

Ad Astra Per Aspera: Legal Revision Of Space Laws And Intellectual Property To Cultivate Global Alliance And Innovation, Jaiden E. Haggiag

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This thesis explores the inadequate nature of the current legal space regime and points out the gaps in outer space laws, including the following: Jurisdictional Challenges, Frameworks of Liability, and IP (Intellectual Property) Enforcement, utilizing laws such as the Outer Space Treaty (OST), the Liability Convention, the Registration Convention, the Moon Agreement, the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), and TRIPS, along with national laws like the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act and The Inventions in Outer Space Act (35 U.S.C. § 105.). Through analysis of current scholarly proposals and treaty evolution and synthesize to provide policy options, the goal of …

A Critical Juncture: The Convergence Of Natural Resource Management And Tribal Sovereignty, Anna Aleta Butterfield

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

This portfolio reflects the work I’ve done in my four years as a dual degree student, pursuing a Master of Science in Environmental Studies and a juris doctorate degree, and focuses on policies and laws surrounding natural resource management. It touches on how those policies relate to and expand or constrict the exercise of sovereignty by indigenous populations.

This piece first considers the effects of plastic on salmon populations and those indigenous groups that rely on salmon for subsistence and cultural purposes. The remaining three pieces focus on various aspects of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes - Montana Water …

Correcting Course: How Congress Can Streamline U.S. Engagement With The International Criminal Court, Sophia N. Ramcharitar

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

Since its participation in the 1998 Rome Conference, the United States has vocalized opposition to key components of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) jurisdiction. This opposition has informed longstanding positions taken by the executive branch and motivated anti-ICC legislation passed by Congress. Support for the ICC’s investigation in Ukraine challenged these narratives across the legislative and executive branches, but the ICC’s arrest warrants of Israeli officials in 2024 renewed Congress’s heightened skepticism of the court and sowed political divisions on efforts to sanction the ICC. Congress’s oscillation on the ICC within the past several years prompts a larger question of …

Administrative Forum Shopping, Amy L. Stein

Fordham Law Review

Allowing private parties in litigation to stack the deck in their favor through forum shopping is standard fare in the United States. But not everyone realizes that public legislators engage in a similar exercise when they stack the deck in one party’s favor through “jurisdiction-stripping” or “jurisdiction-channeling” provisions. Congress can strip federal courts of all or some of its jurisdiction, channel jurisdiction over a particular class of cases into one particular court, and even strip the U.S. Supreme Court of its appellate jurisdiction. Understandably, this last category has received the most attention, as scholars are drawn to the penultimate conflict …

The Purpose Of The Preliminary Injunction, Samuel Bray

Journal Articles

This Article explores a reshaping of the preliminary injunction that is occurring in the federal courts. A preliminary injunction is designed to be a "hold in place" order, blocking actions by the parties that would undermine the efficacy of the court's remedial options. But the preliminary injunction is becoming a device for accelerating the merits decision. Instead of a four-factor test for preliminary relief, increasingly there is one factor: the merits. This Article critiques this transformation, and it argues that the preliminary injunction should be recentered on the protection of the court's remedial options.

After Courts: Democratizing Statutory Law, Ryan D. Doerfler, Samuel Moyn

Michigan Law Review

In Federalist No. 78, Alexander Hamilton argued for locating interpretive authority over law separately from those institutions tasked with formulating it. Hamilton’s vision, never accurate as a description of American practice, has not been credible for a long time. To the extent enormous power is still allocated to judges, our legal institutions have been out of step with our legal theory, which has long regarded them as political actors and policymakers. More practically, every term it is clearer and clearer that the role of the Supreme Court in statutory cases (including checking administrative rulemaking and other processes) is, if anything, …

Younger And Older Abstention, Fred O. Smith Jr.

Michigan Law Review

When victims of systemic rights violations in state criminal proceedings seek federal court relief, governmental defendants often ask federal courts to abstain for reasons of federalism. These arguments frequently disregard the Supreme Court’s emphasis that abstention is a narrow exception to federal courts’ duty to exercise jurisdiction. Lower federal courts are increasingly employing a form of “free-floating federalism,” diverging from the Supreme Court’s careful balance between comity and individual rights. This has led to lower courts’ significant expansion of criminal abstention doctrine, leaving severe irreparable harm unaddressed in an increasingly broad range of settings, such as pretrial detention and child …

Precedential Trauma: Integrating Trauma-Informed Judging In Federal Courts Of Appeals Through Opinion Writing, Alison Brochu

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Inadequacy Of Perpetuating Vestiges Of Segregation In K-12 Curriculum: The Justiciability Of Reviewing Duties To Adequacy In Florida's Education Clause, Soumya Sreerama

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

Although the Supreme Court declared segregation the most abusive affront to education and ruled to eliminate vestiges of segregation “root and branch,” those same roots have grown unchecked to remain prominent today. One of the undercurrents of state-sponsored discrimination that has escaped desegregation remedies is the skewed, whitewashed curriculum that permeated K-12 classrooms in Jim Crow America. More troubling, is that those vestiges of an inadequately biased curriculum are still slithering in students’ courses today. Although student movements and education reformists have attempted to counter skewed curricula by supplementing them with separate ethnic studies courses, states like Florida recently passed …

Loper Bright And The Great Writ, Anthony G. Amsterdam, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Chevron deference is dead. The Court’s forty-year, seventy-decision experiment with Article-III-court deference to “reasonable” agency interpretations of ambiguous federal statutes failed, killed in part by concern that it unduly curbed the “judicial Power” to enforce the rule of law in the face of politics, partisanship, and mission-driven agency decision-making.

“AEDPA deference” lives. The Court’s twenty-five-year, seventy-two decision experiment with Article-III-court deference to “reasonable” state-court interpretations of the Constitution under the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act continues to relegate criminal defendants to prison or death, notwithstanding federal habeas judges’ independent judgment that the state courts have misread or misapplied …

Volume 48 Masthead, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 48 Masthead

Voting Matters: Materiality Considerations And The Shareholder Vote, Renee M. Jones

Seattle University Law Review

For the shareholder franchise to have meaning, shareholders must have access to relevant information to inform their voting decisions. The securities laws’ disclosure requirements play an essential role in informing the shareholder vote.

This Essay focuses on the question of the materiality of information in the context of shareholder voting. It addresses the question of whether ESG-related information is material, positioning the materiality inquiry within the context of shareholders’ voting decisions. It explores the definition of materiality with a focus on the “reasonable investor” concept embedded within the definition. The Essay argues that the implicit expectations of many commentators that …

Volume 48 Masthead, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 48 Masthead