Federal Courts in a Nutshell
Author:
Doernberg, Donald L.
Edition:
5th
Copyright Date:
2016
15 chapters
have results for courts
IV. Subject-Matter Jurisdiction 109 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Certification statutes vary. Some states will accept certification from any federal court; others only from appellate federal courts. In the latter states, district courts presumably order abstention more frequently than courts in states that allow district-court certification. A fair number of state statutes also permit certification from other states’ courts and from foreign courts.
- Article III, § 2, describes the reach of federal judicial power but, with the exception of the Supreme Court, it does not actually subject-matter jurisdiction in any court. That is understandable; since the Constitution leaves creation of other federal courts in Congress’s hands (Art. III, § 1), it could hardly vest jurisdiction in courts not certain to exist. Article III, § 2, therefore, describes the jurisdictional reach of inferior federal courts but leaves to Congress the task of making that potential jurisdiction real.
- Article III, § 2, cl. 2, describes a limited class of cases in which the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction: “Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party * * *.” With respect to the states, despite the apparently unconditional language of the Constitution, the controversy must be within the more general description of the judicial power in Clause 2. Congress has no power either to expand or to curtail the Court’s original jurisdiction. All other types of cases that Article III mentions reach the Supreme Court only through the appellate process. Even in cases within the Court’s original jurisdiction, there is rarely a typical trial scene within the Court’s chamber. Most often, the Court refers the fact-finding process to a special master who reports back to the Court suggesting a disposition. Special masters’ reports receive considerable deference from the Court, making the Court’s approach in such cases seem more...
- the Supreme Court took a dim view of federal courts staying state criminal proceedings. The Court noted, in an apparent bow to the Anti-Injunction Act, that the federal courts’ equity jurisdiction extended only to rights of property, not to criminal prosecutions. In its modern incarnation, the doctrine prohibits federal-court interference with pending state criminal prosecutions, whether by injunction, Otherwise, the district court must dismiss. The Court grounded its decision on what it called “Our Federalism,” and on well-recognized doctrines of equity, comity, and federalism. applies as well to courts-martial.
- If for no other reason, this case would be remarkable because the United States invoked the federal courts’ jurisdiction pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1345, and the Supreme Court nonetheless directed abstention. There was parallel litigation over water rights in state and federal courts. The Court noted that the case did not fit within abstention doctrines. While paying lip service to “the virtually unflagging obligation of the federal courts to exercise the jurisdiction given them * * *,” the Court nonetheless “flagged” the obligation just a bit more. It noted (1) the undesirability of piecemeal adjudication of water rights, (2) the existence of a unified, ongoing system of water rights adjudication, (3) the government’s participation in it in many districts, (4) the absence of any significant proceedings in the federal court (a faint echo, perhaps, of ...(5) the geographical inconvenience of litigants having to travel 300 miles to the federal court. Those factors combined to make...
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I. Federal Court Structure 7 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The system Congress established, however, was not the three-tier system with which you are familiar. There were three kinds of federal courts (with the Supreme Court at the top), but the inferior courts’ jurisdiction differed radically from today’s model. Congress created two types of trial courts, known as district courts and circuit courts. District courts were exclusively courts of original jurisdiction. They served as trial courts principally in maritime cases and in the prosecution of minor federal crimes. Originally there were thirteen districts, divided essentially along state lines.
- There were three circuit courts composed of two Supreme Court Justices and the local district judge, and each incorporating several district courts. The circuit courts had both original and appellate functions. They reviewed decisions of the district courts, and they were also the trial courts for diversity cases and for major government litigation. Neither the district nor the circuit courts had general jurisdiction over cases arising under federal law.
- Article I courts, known colloquially as legislative courts, got their start in 1828. The Florida territorial legislature created a territorial court. The question arose whether the judges of that court were entitled to the protections of Article III judges. The Supreme Court found that the Florida court derived from Congress’s Article IV, § 3, cl. 2, power to govern territories, not from Article III. Therefore, the Article III protections did not apply.
- Later cases extended this principle to military courts, consular courts in foreign countries, and, more recently, local courts in the District of Columbia. All these instances involved extraordinary situations. It is plausible that the Framers did not intend to burden the system with additional judges enjoying unlimited tenure during good behavior. Article I courts, therefore, operate under the real or imagined shadow of direct congressional oversight, a situation against which the Framers carefully guarded in Article III. Chapter II(B) discusses Article I courts at greater length.
- The Constitution created only the United States Supreme Court. The Convention debated whether should be any other federal courts. So, as it had with individual rights and slavery, the Convention deferred resolution to Congress when Article III, § 1, provided that there would be “one supreme Court, and * * * such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” The battle over inferior federal courts at the Convention pitted the Federalists against the Anti-Federalists. When the Federalists won a majority in the new Congress, they wasted no time in establishing a system of inferior federal courts. All federal judgeships Congress creates under Article III have the constitutional protections of service “during good Behaviour” (now generally understood to be for life unless a judge is convicted of a crime, in which case impeachment may follow) and salaries that Congress cannot reduce during a judge’s tenure.
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V. Appellate and Collateral Review 106 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The opinion did one additional thing, which acts as a corollary to the Court’s jurisdiction to review state-court decisions. If the state court’s judgment rests on an adequate and independent state ground, the Supreme Court should not disturb the state-court judgment even if the state court misapprehended federal law. prescribed a seven-step inquiry for reviewing state court opinions. By “adequate and independent,” the Court meant that overturning the state court’s ruling on the federal law would have no effect on the result of the case. This may sound like the very definition of an advisory opinion, ’s sequence, deciding whether the state court ruled correctly on the federal law came before deciding whether, even if the state court was wrong, there was nonetheless an adequate and independent state ground.
- Section 1254 permits the Supreme Court to review court-of-appeals cases at any time. This not only allows review of interlocutory court-of-appeals orders, but also allows the Court to bypass the court of appeals entirely by taking a case as soon as it reaches the appellate court. Supreme Court Rule 11 reserves this for cases of “imperative public importance.” The Court did so which involved the Watergate tapes. Yet the Court refused certiorari before judgment in the court of appeals in the Little Rock segregation case,
- Section 25 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 provided Supreme Court review of state-court decisions, but only when a claim of federal right had been denied in the court below—the situation in which a state judgment could have the greatest adverse effect on federal policy. All review under § 25 was “as of right.” In 1914, Congress extended the statute to cases in which a state court had upheld a federal right, but provided review only by certiorari, not by writ of error. Today, 28 U.S.C. § 1257 authorizes review of state-court judgments in all cases involving federal law. Review lies from “the highest court of a State in which a decision could be had,” which is not always the highest court in the state. If the state’s highest court declines discretionary review, or if state law provides no appeal within the state system, Supreme Court review by certiorari is available. The most famous “jump” occurred in when the Supreme Court reviewed the judgment of the Louisville Police Court (no...
- In addition to the appeal and certiorari jurisdiction, § 1254 empowers the Supreme Court to decide questions of law the courts of appeals certify to it. The statute looks permissive. Commentators tend to say the Court must review, but the Court has developed limiting rules. For example, held that courts of appeals should not certify questions merely to resolve a conflict among different panels of their own judges. In general, the Court added, it was the job of the court of appeals to decide its own cases, not to pass the buck. Certification is rarely proper, permissible if when the identical question is already pending before the Supreme Court or if (as in Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett’s demand for a jury trial in a contempt case), the court of appeals itself was equally divided and there was no lower court opinion to affirm. Interestingly, the ...” be dismissed. Since the courts of appeals rarely used certification, Congress, when it last extensively revised the Judicial...
- trial-level proceedings, and there is normally no appeal. Similarly, when a trial court denies a motion for a new trial, the court enters a final (appealable) judgment. But if the court grants the motion, proceedings in the trial court are not over, so in most cases there is no immediate appeal.
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IX. Choice of Law in the Federal Courts 66 results (showing 5 best matches)
- That is only one possible source of federal common law. Sometimes the courts look to model codes for ideas. On occasion the courts will adopt the common law of the state in which they sit as federal common law, preferring uniformity among all the courts that sit in that state to uniformity across the federal courts that may clash undesirably with the law of the state in which a federal court sits.
- To the extent that the common law a state recognized and the common law the federal courts in that state recognized differed, For cases that either state courts or federal courts could hear (usually diversity cases), counsel representing an out-of-state party might be able to choose whether a federal or state court would adjudicate. Counsel representing an out-of-state plaintiff would choose state or federal court depending on which viewed the common law more favorably to the client. The in-state defendant had nothing to say about the forum and so was stuck with whichever court plaintiff chose. Where the out-of-state party was the defendant, the in-state plaintiff could force the federal court to hear the case by filing there, but if plaintiff chose the state court, the out-of-state defendant could remove to the federal court if the common law was better there. The advantage to non-citizens of the state was clear, and a famous 1928 case
- said to apply the substantive law of the state in which the federal court sits. That is really directs the federal court to apply the law that the state in which the court sits law. Why? The answer is that a New York state court would have applied Pennsylvania—not New York—law to determine Tompkins’s status. The choice-of-law rule in tort cases at the time was —the law of the place of the wrong. If the New York federal court should reach the same result that a New York state court would reach, then it should apply the same law. The Court articulated that rule three years after
- The plaintiff sought to avoid the bar by arguing that in an equity case, the federal law of laches should govern timeliness. The Supreme Court ruled against her. There are three important aspects of the case. First, unlike in , Congress certainly had the power to prescribe limitations periods for the federal courts. For that reason, the Court spoke of the constitutional imperative. Second, the Court characterized a federal court sitting in diversity as simply another court of the state. Third, the Court prescribed deciding whether something was “substantive” for
- The Court lost little time in saying that it was overruling , it never did correct the error, if error there was. The Court acknowledged that if only statutory interpretation were involved, it probably would not have overturned . But, the Court said, “the unconstitutionality of the course pursued [by the federal courts] has now been made clear * * *.”
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VI. The Rooker-Feldman Doctrine 26 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The Court noted that Congress had given the district courts only original jurisdiction. If there was an impairment issue, plaintiffs should have raised it in the state court and pursued it through the state appellate process. Plaintiffs had raised it only on a petition for rehearing in the Indiana Supreme Court, which summarily denied rehearing. The United States Supreme Court recognized counsel’s ploy for what it was—an attempt to have a federal district court overturn the judgment of a state court—and refused to permit federal intervention.
- A unanimous Supreme Court reversed, based on the timing of the federal and state litigation: “The doctrine * * * is confined to cases * * * brought by state-court losers complaining of injuries caused by state-court judgments rendered the district court proceedings commenced and inviting district court review and rejection of those judgments.” (Emphasis added.) That did not mean that a federal action in such circumstances should necessarily proceed; the district courts can stay federal actions or, in some circumstances, refrain from adjudication by invoking one of the abstention doctrines. But “[d]isposition of the federal action, once the state-court determination is complete, would be governed by preclusion law * * *,” which, the Court pointed out, was not jurisdictional. “In parallel litigation, a federal court may be bound to recognize the claim- and issue-preclusive effects of a state-court judgment, but federal jurisdiction over an action does not terminate automatically on...
- was straightforward. Plaintiffs, having lost in Indiana’s highest court, sought Supreme Court review, but their appeal “failed because the record did not disclose the presence of any question constituting a basis for such a review.” Undeterred, they brought an action in the district court arguing that the Indiana Supreme Court’s judgment violated the Impairment Clause. The district court dismissed for want of subject-matter jurisdiction; the Supreme Court affirmed.
- But the Court made a distinction the lower courts had not. Although it disallowed federal court review of the District of Columbia court’s ruling on the waiver requests, it noted that “[t]o the extent that [plaintiffs] mounted a general challenge to the constitutionality of Rule 46(I)(b)(3), however, the District Court did have subject matter jurisdiction over their complaints.” Evaluating the rule’s constitutionality did “not require review of a judicial decision in a particular case. The District Court, therefore, has subject matter jurisdiction over these elements of the * * * complaints.”
- We ask whether the federal plaintiff seeks to set aside the state court judgment or whether he is, in fact, presenting an independent claim. Put another way, if the injury which the federal plaintiff alleges resulted from the state court judgment itself, then controls, and the lower federal courts lack jurisdiction over the claim. It does not matter that the state court judgment might be erroneous or even unconstitutional. Nor does it matter that the time for appeal to the United States Supreme Court may have passed.
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III. Congressional Control of Federal Jurisdiction 16 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The Constitution creates only the Supreme Court, so the Convention delegates generally described the realm of federal judicial functioning in broad categories. Because there were not necessarily going to be any inferior federal courts, the Constitution could not proceed on the assumption that they would exist. Accordingly, Article III, § 2, cl. 1, describes kinds of cases—federal-question, diversity, federal government as a party, etc.—without actually jurisdiction in any inferior court. That is why the jurisdiction of any Article III court other than the Supreme Court must rest on a vesting statute, which itself comply with Article III. Thus, it is never correct simply to assert that a district or circuit court has jurisdiction under Article III; there must always be a statute specifically conferring jurisdiction. The Constitution itself vests jurisdiction only in the Supreme Court, and protects only the Court’s original jurisdiction from congressional control.
- Congress sometimes limits federal courts’ jurisdiction by restricting the remedies they may grant. The oldest example is the Anti-Injunction Act, which Congress passed in 1793. The default position is that federal courts should not stay state-court proceedings, subject to three exceptions that the Court interprets very strictly: (1) if Congress expressly authorizes injunctions, (which the Court has strictly limited to cases, where the federal court has attached property and a state court later tries to adjudicate with respect to the same property), and (3) ”to protect or effectuate its judgments” (limited to use when a federal judgment is preclusive on a claim or an issue and a state court attempts to relitigate).
- From time to time there are proposals to restrict the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction, usually because their proponents disapprove of the way the Court has decided cases in a particular area. In 1964, a congressman introduced a bill to deprive all of the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear reapportionment cases. In the late 1950s, a Senate bill proposed depriving the Supreme Court of jurisdiction over bar admissions, state subversion laws, congressional-committee cases, and cases involving the Federal Loyalty-Security Program. Neither passed.
- upheld Congress’s power to give the Emergency Court of Appeals exclusive jurisdiction over suits attacking regulations under a wartime price-control statute, but that was really a venue measure. Congress directed cases that otherwise could have gone to federal district courts or to state trial courts to the ECA. Appeals ran directly to the Supreme Court.
- In 28 U.S.C. §§ 1341 (the Tax Injunction Act) and 1342 (the Johnson Act), Congress, on grounds of federalism, forbade federal courts to restrain enforcing state taxes and many state public-utility rate orders, when state courts provided a “plain, speedy, and efficient remedy.” upheld the Norris-LaGuardia Act, which deprived federal courts of jurisdiction to issue injunctions in certain labor disputes. In dictum, the Court mentioned that “there can be no question of the power of Congress thus to define and limit the jurisdiction” of federal courts.
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II. The Courts and the Constitution 35 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Article III extends the judicial power only to specified types of “cases” and “controversies,” and the Supreme Court has made clear that Article III courts cannot hear matters not qualifying as “cases” or “controversies.” The Case-or-Controversy Clause embraces several limitations on the federal courts’ authority.
- Query what options such potential plaintiffs have. The Court seemed to say that someone could only test the validity of a statute by violating it, risking punishment if the court rejected the claim. In effect, the Court was telling the citizen that “the only way to determine whether the suspect is a mushroom or a toadstool is to eat it.” Congress intended the Declaratory
- In the past few decades, the Supreme Court has created an exception to the ordinary mootness doctrine. In , for example, a plaintiff seeking a declaration of her right to an abortion was pregnant when she sued but had given birth when the case reached the Supreme Court. To hold the case moot, the Court said, would effectively prevent judicial review of abortion questions because of the short period between conception and birth; the issue was “capable of repetition, yet evading review.” When time constraints would effectively insulate a law from judicial scrutiny, the Court’s policy is understandable, but it is difficult to see how the unavailability of normal review makes the matter
- Congress has waded into the battle over whether the United States should recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, enacting a law that allowed Jerusalem-born Americans to list Israel as their place of birth. The Secretary of State declined to enforce the statute and, defending an action under the statute, argued that the case presented a political question; the lower courts agreed. The Court unanimously disagreed, finding that judicially manageable standards exist, factors, criticizing the Court’s opinion as insufficiently demanding for failing to do so. That case merely decided justiciability; when it returned to the Court three years later, a badly split Court ruled that the statute infringed the President’s exclusive power to recognize foreign governments, handing the plaintiff a loss on separation-of-powers instead of the political-question grounds.
- But the Court has been careful to open the door only to cases that present true hardships. It is unpredictable where the Justices will draw the line between real and speculative controversies. A companion case to The lower courts, following this lead, refused to determine the validity of proposed regulations. , the Court dismissed as “speculative” the challenge of a non-pregnant woman who alleged that uncertainty as to her ability to obtain an abortion interfered with her marriage.
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VII. The Eleventh Amendment 21 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The Amendment’s wording makes it sound like a jurisdictional provision. One might expect, therefore, that states cannot consent to suits in the federal courts any more than other litigants can extend courts’ subject-matter jurisdiction by consent. But it has not been consistently so. The Court allows states to raise the Eleventh-Amendment issue for the first time on appeal, explaining “that the Eleventh Amendment defense sufficiently partakes of the nature of a jurisdictional bar so that it need not be raised in the trial court.” In the same case, however, the Court noted that states can waive their immunity, but “only where stated ‘by the most ...) leave no room for any other reasonable construction.’ ” Thus, a state’s mere participation in a federal funding program subject to extensive federal regulation does not subject the state to federal adjudication. The Court noted, rather icily, that “Constructive consent is not a doctrine commonly associated with the surrender of...
- For example, California’s constitution provides: “Suits may be brought against the State in such manner and in such courts as shall be directed by law.” The Court held that language insufficiently specific that California was consenting to suit in a court and refused relief. But the Court has also unanimously held that a state’s decision to remove or to join other defendants in removing a case So one may legitimately ask whether the Amendment speaks to subject-matter jurisdiction or merely establishes an immunity. The Court’s answer appears to be, “Yes.”
- cited, the Court had said the suit was “in essence” against the state and that the state was the “substantial party in interest,” but that was equally true in . As the Court has acknowledged, an injunction permissible under Court affirmed the district court’s order that in future state officials comply with federal timing requirements regarding processing welfare applications and paying benefits. That undoubtedly ended up costing the state more money than it would have had to pay for three years of past violations.
- . Reviewing a long series of prior cases, the Court divided suits against state officers into two categories. A suit to compel officers “to do acts which constitute a specific performance” of state contracts was forbidden; a suit to preclude “acts of wrong and injury to the rights and property of the plaintiff acquired under a contract” was not. Thus, immunity precluded a federal court from ordering a state auditor to pay the holder of bonds on which the state had defaulted, but it did not preclude a federal court injunction against seizing the bonds themselves.
- appears to be a forum immunity, merely insulating states from being defendants in diversity litigation. The Court has read it far more broadly than that, however, and it now forbids jurisdiction over federal-question actions by individuals against states, despite its distinctly diversity-sounding wording. In addition, the Court takes the position that state sovereign immunity from individuals’ suits antedated the Constitution
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Preface 5 results
- I have often told my Federal Courts students that it is not possible to simplify the doctrine of Federal Courts. It is only possible to oversimplify it. I hope that the following pages will do a reasonable job of summarizing areas where the law is clear and offering ways to think about the areas in which it is not.
- Second, many books treat the abstention doctrines as a major subject apart from subject-matter jurisdiction. Conceptually, it makes more sense to treat those doctrines as a subcategory of a more general discussion of subject-matter jurisdiction. Typically, discussions of subject-matter jurisdiction focus on (1) the areas in which the federal courts have (sometimes exclusive) jurisdiction, (2) the limitations on that jurisdiction, and (3) areas over which the federal courts have no subject-matter jurisdiction. The abstention doctrines, for all of their complexity, are simply a fourth area, dealing with situations in which the federal courts clearly
- Law does not fit into neat compartments, and that affects all nutshells. For example, the availability of post-conviction remedies has much to do with how the federal courts function institutionally Congress and the states. But post-conviction remedies can be (and in many schools is) a course unto itself. Although, I have tried to separate considerations relating to federal-courts doctrine from those fitting better in a post-conviction-remedies course, the line between them is fuzzy and constantly shifting.
- an exhaustive discussion—or even mention—of all of the Supreme Court cases relevant to an area. When the source of a quotation is obvious from context, I have not included a separate footnote, contrary to the dictates of both common law-review practice and the Bluebook. Similarly, I have not included second or subsequent full citations of cases, despite the Bluebook’s demands. (I am especially proud of not wasting the time and space that slavish adherence to the Bluebook requires.)
- The organization of this volume differs from that of its predecessors in two major ways. First, many Civil Procedure and Federal Courts books treat removal as a kind of jurisdiction somehow different from the “ordinary” subject-matter jurisdiction categories—federal-question jurisdiction and diversity jurisdiction. But it is not; it simply is a manner of
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VIII. Officials’ Immunities 13 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The Court has also created a qualified immunity, which is a bit more slippery. Qualified immunity is a latecomer, making its first appearance by name in the Supreme Court in 1974.
- Initially the Court ruled that the district court should consider (1) whether the facts alleged showed a constitutional violation and (2) whether the right the plaintiff asserted was clearly established, in that order. Eight years later, unanimously gave the district courts discretion to take the questions in whatever sequence offered the best prospect for early resolution. Many judges and commentators had been critical of the decisions in the nature of dicta on constitutional questions. Nonetheless, the Court recently reiterated the If you find this difficult to square with the Court’s normal reticence about non-dispositive constitutional adjudication, you are not alone.
- . The Court criticized the circuit court for considering the clearly-established question at too high a level of generality.
- the district court granted summary judgment to the defendants both on grounds of qualified immunity and that the officials’ actions were constitutional. The Ninth Circuit affirmed the judgment on qualified-immunity grounds after finding that the officials’ actions were unconstitutional. The plaintiff did not appeal. The victorious officials, notwithstanding the circuit’s final judgment in their favor, sought and received Supreme Court review. The Court, finding that the case before it had become moot, vacated the circuit’s ruling on the constitutional issue despite the absence of a then-live controversy, explaining that the defendants had a continuing interest in the constitutional question because it might arise in later cases. Thus, although the lower courts may still
- Justice Powell wrote for four Justices (concurring and dissenting). He agreed with the Court’s result but complained about the part of the standard. “One need only look to the decisions of this Court—to our reversals, our recognition of evolving concepts, and our five-to-four splits—to recognize the hazard of even informed prophecy as to what are ‘unquestioned constitutional rights.’ ”
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Table of Contents 13 results (showing 5 best matches)
Introduction 1 result
- The course in Federal Courts concerns the institutional role of the federal court system in elaborating those two themes: federalism and separation of powers. The federal courts have .... Understanding the federal courts’ relationships with state governments (especially state judiciaries) and with the other branches of the federal government requires grappling with doctrines that have developed to deal with the complexities of inter-system and inter-branch relationships. The Constitutional Convention had to confront at least four major areas of conflict. The first, thrust on the Convention by the failure of the Articles of Confederation to provide a workable national structure, regards the balance of power between the central government and the states—federalism. The second involves the distribution of power within the new government—separation of powers. For the fifty-five delegates at the Convention, the challenge was to evolve a structural plan that would address both areas. That...
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Table of Cases 4 results
- Braden v. 30th Judicial Circuit Court, 410 U.S. 484 (1973), 165, 170
- District of Columbia Court of Appeals v. Feldman, 460 U.S. 462 (1983), 174
- Executive Software of North Am., Inc. v. United States Dist. Court for the Cent. Dist. of Ca., 24 F.3d 1545 (9th Cir. 1994), 77
- Hensley v. Mun. Court, 411 U.S. 345 (1973), 164
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Halftitle Page 1 result
Title Page 1 result
- Publication Date: February 5th, 2016
- ISBN: 9781634602785
- Subject: Federal Courts
- Series: Nutshells
- Type: Overviews
- Description: This authoritative text lays out the constitutional sources of federal judicial authority and its limits. Some limits are constitutional, others statutory, and still others self-imposed. There is extended consideration of constitutional and statutory arising-under jurisdiction, diversity jurisdiction, abstention, sovereign immunity and the Eleventh Amendment, official immunities, congressional control of federal jurisdiction, and the law applicable in the federal courts—the dreaded Erie doctrine.