Tribal jurisdiction over nonmembers is limited to two narrow areas: consensual economic relationships between tribes and nonmembers, and nonmember activity that threatens tribal integrity. Even within these two narrow fields, the Supreme Court has stated that tribal adjudicatory power over nonmembers—the authority to decide legal rights of individuals, usually in...
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act’s predecessor established a multilevel administrative and judicial review system for special education decisions, and ever since, the volume of special education cases in federal court has ballooned. Most present cases involve disputes over whether the school district drafted an individualized...
An increasing number of states have passed laws aimed at preventing the costs of litigation from burdening legitimate petitioning activity. These laws frequently include procedural protections, such as a special motion to dismiss. When state law claims are instead brought in federal court, these laws and their procedural protections implicate the Erie doctrine and the Rules of Decision Act, which has led some federal courts not to apply...
Scholars have long treated the Exceptions Clause of Article III as a serious threat to the Supreme Court’s central constitutional function: establishing definitive and uniform rules of federal law. This Article argues that scholars have overlooked an important function of the Clause. Congress has repeatedly used its broad “exceptions power” to facilitate, not to undermine, the Supreme Court’s constitutional role. Drawing on insights...
The special damage rule—a component of standing doctrine requiring a plaintiff’s alleged injury to differ somehow from that of the general public—has long thwarted citizen challenges to inaction by government regulators, particularly in environmental suits. While courts in many jurisdictions have trended toward relaxing the special damage rule in environmental cases, the requirement has not been similarly adjusted in other areas of...