Surely You Didn’t Mean “No” Jurisdiction: Why the Supreme Court’s Selective Hearing in Hamdan Is Good for Democracy

by Melissa Patterson

Usually, only legal scholars routinely consider federal court jurisdiction-stripping a hot topic. Although Congress periodically considers bills stripping federal courts of jurisdiction in one way or another, such attempts almost always fail, and so debate outside the academy focuses much more on how the federal courts ought to decide cases than if they may decide them at all. Even in academia, where the body of scholarly literature about Congress’s power to deprive federal courts of constitutionally acceptable jurisdiction is “choking on redundancy,”2 the debate has proceeded in something of a vacuum given the dearth of enacted legislation that directly strips federal courts of their traditionally exercised jurisdiction.

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