In the 1789 Judiciary Act, Congress accepted the Constitution’s invitation to create lower federal courts and gave them broad jurisdiction, but Congress also imposed significant limitations. For example, the Act included jurisdictional dollar-amount requirements not only for cases brought by parties from different states (what is known as diversity jurisdiction), but also for civil actions brought by the United States.[25] The 1789 Judiciary Act also omitted any general grant of jurisdiction to the lower federal courts to address suits arising under the Constitution, laws, and treaties of the United States. Such cases could be filed only if they happened to fall within other more specific grants of jurisdiction, which many did not.
From the beginning, moreover, the federal courts’ exercise of their jurisdiction conferred by Congress provoked occasional controversy and calls for statutory revision. In the early decades of constitutional history, contention surrounded the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction under Section 25 of the 1789 Judiciary Act to review the decisions of state supreme courts. Throughout the antebellum era, a number of states and state courts objected that Supreme Court review of state court decisions was incompatible with the partial sovereignty of states and their institutions as guaranteed by the Constitution. In 1831, the House Judiciary Committee reported out a bill that would have stripped the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction to review state court judgments, but that measure failed on the floor amid concerns about asserted state authority to nullify acts of Congress.[26]
Following the Civil War, fearing that the Supreme Court might invalidate the Military Reconstruction Act,[27] Congress enacted a statute depriving the Court of appellate jurisdiction over a pending habeas corpus case that presented important constitutional questions concerning Reconstruction. The Court upheld this deprivation of its appellate jurisdiction in Ex parte McCardle.[28] However, in upholding this jurisdiction-stripping statute, the Court’s view of Congress’s power remained ambiguous. The Court noted that although Congress had eliminated one avenue for parties to bring their challenges to the Military Reconstruction Act to the Court, it had potentially left open another avenue that could be used in future cases.
In another case from the Reconstruction Era, United States v. Klein, the Supreme Court invalidated a statute that made it harder for pardoned rebels to receive compensation from the United States.[29] Formally, the statute directed both the Court of Claims and the Supreme Court to dismiss “for want of jurisdiction” certain claims against the United States in which a party relied on a presidential pardon to establish proof of loyalty during the Civil War. The Court issued an opinion whose rationale, to this day, has inspired uncertainty and debate. It held that a statute that confers Supreme Court jurisdiction up to “a given point” in a case, but then requires the Court to dismiss that case “when it ascertains that a certain state of things exists,”
