2.1 Courts of Limited Jurisdiction

Federal courts are courts of limited jurisdiction. Article III, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to create inferior federal courts. The outer boundary of federal judicial power is defined in Article III, Section 2. These constitutional provisions are not self-executing. Beginning with the Judiciary Act of 1789, Congress has created a system of federal courts and has vested it with much, but not all, of the jurisdiction permitted by Section 2. The Constitution therefore established the potential scope of federal jurisdiction, and Congress has defined the actual, more limited, breadth of it.

Federal statutes also limit the exercise of subject matter jurisdiction by federal courts. Some of these limitations are explicit restrictions on federal jurisdiction in matters such as state taxation and public utility rate-making. /1/ Other limitations are implicit in the jurisdictional provisions of other congressional enactments.  The U.S. Supreme Court has also restricted the exercise of statutorily conferred jurisdiction. Some of the restrictions are derived from Article III’s case and controversy requirement, discussed in Chapter 3 of this Manual. Others fall within the ambit of the abstention doctrine, discussed in this chapter.