Federal Jurisdiction. Injunction against State Administrative Agency. Where State Law Provides Appeal from Administrative Agency, Federal Court as Matter of Equitable Discretion Should Not Exercise Jurisdiction in Suit Alleging Deprivation of Due Process

1951 ◽  
Vol 37 (7) ◽  
pp. 1007
Keyword(s):  
Due Process ◽  
Federal Court ◽  
State Law ◽  
Administrative Agency ◽  
Federal Jurisdiction ◽  
In Suit

scholarly journals The Constitutional Law of Incarceration, Reconfigured

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margo Schlanger
Keyword(s):  
Due Process ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Federal Court ◽  
Pretrial Detention ◽  
Legal Standards ◽  
Eighth Amendment ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Incarcerated Populations ◽  
Lower Courts

103 Cornell L. Rev. 357 (2018)As American incarcerated populations grew starting in the 1970s, so too did court oversight of prisons. In the late 1980s, however, as incarceration continued to boom, federal court oversight shrank. This Article addresses the most central doctrinal limit on oversight of jails and prisons, the Supreme Court’s restrictive reading of the constitutional provisions governing treatment of prisoners — the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause and the Due Process Clause, which regulate, respectively, post-conviction imprisonment and pretrial detention. The Court’s interpretation of the Eighth Amendment’s ban of cruel and unusual punishment, in particular, radically undermined prison officials’ accountability for tragedies behind bars — allowing, even encouraging, them to avoid constitutional accountability. And lower courts compounded the error by importing that reading into Due Process doctrine as well. In 2015, in Kingsley v. Hendrickson, a jail use of force case, the Court relied on 1970s precedent, not subsequent caselaw that had placed undue emphasis on the subjective culpability of prison and jail officials as the crucial source of constitutional concern. The Kingsley Court returned to a more appropriate objective analysis. In finding for the plaintiff, the Supreme Court unsettled the law far past Kingsley’s direct factual setting of pretrial detention, expressly inviting post-conviction challenges to restrictive — and incoherent — Eighth Amendment caselaw. The Court rejected not only the defendants’ position, but the logic that underlies 25 years of pro-government outcomes in prisoners’ rights cases. But commentary and developing caselaw since Kingsley has not fully recognized its implications. I argue that both doctrinal logic and justice dictate that constitutional litigation should center on the experience of incarcerated prisoners, rather than the culpability of their keepers. The takeaway of my analysis is that the Constitution is best read to impose governmental liability for harm caused to prisoners — whether pretrial or post-conviction — by unreasonably dangerous conditions of confinement and unjustified uses of force. In this era of mass incarceration, our jails and prisons should not be shielded from accountability by legal standards that lack both doctrinal and normative warrant.

scholarly journals In the Beginning There Was None: Supreme Court Review of State Criminal Prosecutions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin C. Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Federal Court ◽  
Structural Relationship ◽  
State Court ◽  
Court Decisions ◽  
Court System ◽  
Federal Law ◽  
Federal Judiciary ◽  
Federal Jurisdiction ◽  
In The Beginning

This Article challenges the unquestioned assumption of all contemporary scholars of federal jurisdiction that section 25 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 authorized Supreme Court appellate review of state criminal prosecutions. Section 25 has long been thought to be one of the most important provisions of the most important jurisdictional statute enacted by Congress. The Judiciary Act of 1789 gave concrete institutional shape to a federal judiciary only incompletely defined by Article III. And section 25 supplied a key piece of the structural relationship between the previously existing state court systems and the new federal court system that Congress constructed with the Act. It provided for Supreme Court appellate review of certain state court decisions denying the federal-law-based rights of certain litigants.

Culpability Standards in Section 1983 Litigation Against Criminal Justice Officials: When and Why Mental State Matters

2001 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. Worrall
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Mental State ◽  
Federal Court ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
State Law ◽  
The U.S

Title 42, Section 1983 of the U.S. Code provides a remedy in federal court for individuals who suffer constitutional rights violations at the hands of criminal justice officials. To succeed in a Section 1983 lawsuit, a plaintiff must demonstrate a constitutional violation by an official acting under color of state law. Recently, however, courts have begun to require that constitutional rights violations be committed with a certain level of culpability for a finding of liability, a development that has received little attention in the criminal justice literature. Accordingly, this article seeks to (1) sort out the important culpability issues associated with Section 1983 litigation, with particular reference to theories of liability, and (2) discuss the relevance of this inquiry for both academics and practitioners, calling attention to the problems the current multitude of culpability standards pose.

1 Courts and Foreign Affairs

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bradley Curtis A
Keyword(s):  
Common Law ◽  
Federal Court ◽  
The United States ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
The Political ◽  
State Law ◽  
Government Institutions ◽  
The Common ◽  
Political Question

This chapter provides an overview of some of the constitutional, statutory, and common law doctrines that govern the adjudication of foreign affairs–related disputes in the United States. These doctrines include requirements for federal court jurisdiction, “justiciability” limitations such as the political question doctrine, the Erie doctrine concerning federal court application of state law, and the common law “act of state” doctrine. The chapter also discusses more general interpretive principles such as the Charming Betsy canon of construction and deference to the executive branch. The chapter concludes by briefly describing the constitutional authority of U.S. government institutions other than the courts, including the situations in which state law that concerns foreign affairs will be preempted.

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