Jurisdiction Stripping: When May Congress Prohibit the Courts from Hearing a Case?
Legal Sidebari
Jurisdiction Stripping: When May Congress
Prohibit the Courts from Hearing a Case?
March 15, 2018
The U.S. Supreme Court recently issued its decision in Patchak v. Zinke, a case implicating a host of
difficult legal issues concerning the respective powers of Congress and the judiciary. Patchak ultimately
upheld the Gun Lake Trust Land Reaffirmation Act (Gun Lake Act) against a separation-of-powers
challenge. However, because a majority of the Court could not agree on the legal basis for its decision,
Patchak’s ultimate meaning with respect to Congress’s power over the courts remains uncertain. The
various opinions in Patchak signal sharp divisions on the Court concerning the scope of Congress’s
power to “strip” the jurisdiction of federal courts. Whereas at least four Justices appear to view that power
as being “plenary” in nature, at least four other Justices embrace a more restricted view of Congress’s
authority. Patchak also implicates several other important issues related to the law of federal courts,
including whether a particular law alters a court’s jurisdiction, as well as what Congress must say in order
to modify the government’s sovereign immunity.
This Sidebar analyzes Patchak and its relevance to Congress. The Sidebar begins by briefly describing the
Court’s prior attempts to demarcate the boundaries of Congress’s power to take cases away from the
federal judiciary. The Sidebar then discusses the facts and opinions in Patchak and analyzes the effect
Patchak may have on Congress’s legislative objectives.
Setting the Stage
Over the past 150 years, the Supreme Court has repeatedly struggled to delimit the power Congress can
exert over the federal courts without unlawfully encroaching upon the judiciary’s powers under Article III
of the U.S. Constitution. On the one hand, the Supreme Court has announced that Congress cannot “enact
a statute directing that,” in the case of “‘Smith v. Jones,’ ‘Smith wins.’” Picking the winners of lawsuits is
what federal judges do, and allowing Congress to choose who wins a case would therefore raise grave
separation-of-powers concerns. On the other hand, however, any law that alters a party’s legal rights
necessarily affects that party’s ability to win a lawsuit, and Congress generally possesses the
constitutional authority to enact legislation that affects a person’s legal rights and to make such legislation
“applicable to pending cases, even when the amendment is outcome determinative.” Thus, the Supreme
Court has held that Congress generally “does not impinge on judicial power when it directs courts to
apply a new legal standard to undisputed facts,” even if that new legal standard may alter the outcome of a
pending case. As long as Congress changes the law—as opposed to directing a court to reach a specified
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result under old law—Congress does not impinge upon the judicial power. The Supreme Court has
likewise concluded that Congress possesses largely “plenary” authority to determine what sorts of cases
the federal courts may and may not hear—even though preventing courts from hearing certain classes of
cases on jurisdictional grounds will necessarily cause plaintiffs who bring those cases to lose.
Because those competing principles are necessarily in tension, an enduring question since the Supreme
Court first broached these issues 150 years ago has been: When does a statute that requires a court to
dismiss a case constitute an unconstitutional encroachment upon the judicial power, and when does it
instead constitute a lawful exercise of Congress’s legislative power and its authority to define the
jurisdiction of the federal courts? Although the Supreme Court’s 2016 decision in Bank Markazi v.
Peterson suggested that Congress possesses considerable power to “amend the law and make the change
applicable to pending cases, even when the amendment is outcome determinative,” Patchak presented the
Court with an opportunity to explore the outer limits of that power.
The Facts
The dispute underlying Patchak began in 2009 when the Secretary of the Interior took a parcel of land
known as the “Bradley Property” into trust for the benefit of the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of
Pottawatomi Indians, which wanted to build a casino on the property. A nearby landowner, David
Patchak, filed suit, claiming that the Secretary lacked the authority to take the Bradley Property into trust.
The Secretary argued that the doctrine of sovereign immunity—which prohibits litigants from suing the
United States without its consent—barred Patchak’s suit. The Supreme Court initially rejected the
Secretary’s argument, concluding that the United States had “waived its sovereign immunity from
Patchak’s action.”
In response to the Supreme Court’s decision allowing Patchak’s lawsuit against the Secretary to continue,
Congress enacted the Gun Lake Act, which provided that any lawsuit relating to the Bradley Property
could “not be filed or maintained in a Federal court.” The Gun Lake Act further required any federal court
presiding over a lawsuit involving the Bradley Property to “promptly dismiss[]” it. Accordingly, the
district court presiding over Patchak’s case dismissed his claims. Patchak appealed to the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, claiming that, by forcing the court to dismiss his pending case, Congress
had “impermissibly infringed the judicial power that Article III of the Constitution vests exclusively in the
Judicial Branch” by directing a particular result in a pending case. After the D.C. Circuit rejected
Patchak’s argument that the Gun Lake Act violated Article III, Patchak asked the Supreme Court to
review the case.
The Opinions
The Supreme Court granted certiorari and affirmed, rejecting Patchak’s challenge to the Gun Lake Act.
However, the Court could not agree why the law passed constitutional muster.
Justice Thomas, in a plurality opinion joined by Justices Breyer, Alito, and Kagan, concluded that the Gun
Lake Act was a permissible exercise of Congress’s well-established authority to demarcate the
jurisdiction of the federal courts. The plurality first cited prior Supreme Court precedent holding that
Congress may generally enact a statute that “strips federal jurisdiction over a class of cases” without
violating Article III so long as that statute does not violate some other provision of the Constitution or
otherwise guarantee results that Congress would ordinarily be “powerless to prescribe.” Because the
plurality believed that the Act did “nothing more” than strip the federal courts of “jurisdiction over suits
relating to the Bradley Property,” the plurality concluded that the Gun Lake Act was “a valid exercise of
Congress’s legislative power” rather than an unconstitutional congressional attempt to “usurp[] a court’s
power to interpret and apply the law to the circumstances before it.” The plurality reasoned that, whereas
“Congress violates Article III when it ‘compels findings or results under old law,’” Congress does not
encroach upon the judicial power when it merely “changes the law.” The plurality concluded that the Gun
Lake Act did the latter because it modified the jurisdiction of the federal courts; whereas federal courts
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previously “had jurisdiction to hear” cases like Patchak’s, “now they do not.” Because the Gun Lake Act
did not “attempt[] to direct the result” of Patchak’s case “without altering the legal standards” that would
apply to that case, the plurality determined that the Gun Lake Act was not equivalent to an
unconstitutional “statute that says, ‘In Smith v. Jones, Smith wins.’” The plurality accordingly concluded
that the law did not violate Article III.
However, Justice Thomas’s opinion did not command a majority of the full Court. Although Justice
Ginsburg and Justice Sotomayor concurred with the Court’s conclusion that the lower court had properly
dismissed Patchak’s case, they believed that the Gun Lake Act was “most naturally read” as restoring the
United States’s sovereign immunity from Patchak’s suit, rather than as “strip[ping] the federal courts of
jurisdiction” to adjudicate Patchak’s claims at all. The concurring Justices emphasized that Congress had
enacted the Gun Lake Act in order to overrule the Supreme Court’s prior determination that the United
States had waived its sovereign immunity from Patchak’s claims. By voting to uphold the Gun Lake Act
on sovereign immunity grounds, the concurring Justices avoided many of the constitutional questions
regarding when, and under what circumstances, Congress unlawfully exercises the judicial power by
abrogating the federal courts’ jurisdiction over a limited subset of cases.
Chief Justice Roberts, in a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Kennedy and Gorsuch, maintained that
the Gun Lake Act unconstitutionally “target[ed] a single party for adverse treatment and directed the
precise disposition of his pending case.” The Chief Justice first disagreed with the plurality’s conclusion
that the Gun Lake Act was best read as a jurisdiction-stripping statute. Whereas prior Supreme Court
precedent had held that a statute deprives the federal courts of jurisdiction only when “Congress has
‘clearly stated’ that the rule is jurisdictional,” the Gun Lake Act did “not clearly state that it imposes a
jurisdictional restriction.” The Chief Justice therefore concluded that the Gun Lake Act was not merely an
exercise of Congress’s broad authority to demarcate the jurisdiction of the federal courts, but rather an
unconstitutional congressional attempt to usurp a judge’s duty to decide which party wins a particular
case. The Chief Justice further maintained that, even if the plurality was correct that the Gun Lake Act
was best read as a jurisdiction-stripping statute, the law would still be unconstitutional because
separation-of-powers principles prohibit Congress from “manipulat[ing] jurisdictional rules to decide the
outcome of a particular pending case.” According to Chief Justice Roberts, Article III prohibits Congress
from “enacting a bespoke statute tailored to” a particular case “that resolves the parties’ specific legal
disputes to guarantee [one party’s] victory,” and the Gun Lake Act did exactly that. The Chief Justice
likewise disagreed with the concurring Justices’ conclusion that the Gun Lake Act could be read “as
restoring the Government’s sovereign immunity from suit” because Congress had not “express[ed] ‘an
unambiguous intention’” to “withdraw[] the sovereign’s consent to suit” in the explicit language of the
Gun Lake Act.
The Takeaways
Because no single opinion garnered a majority vote, Patchak’s impact on the jurisdiction-stripping
doctrine remains uncertain. “When a fragmented Court decides a case and no single rationale explaining
the result enjoys the assent of five Justices, ‘the holding of the Court may be viewed as that position taken
by those Members who concurred in the judgments on the narrowest grounds.’” Because the concurring
Justices voted to uphold the Gun Lake Act on what appears to be narrower grounds than the plurality, the
plurality’s relatively broad statements regarding the extent of Congress’s power to take cases away from
the courts may not ultimately have any binding effect. Furthermore, even though Justice Sotomayor voted
to uphold the Gun Lake Act on sovereign immunity grounds, she nonetheless “agree[d] with the dissent”
that “an Act that merely deprives federal courts of jurisdiction over a single proceeding . . . should be
viewed with great skepticism.” Justice Sotomayor, like the dissent, expressed concern that the plurality’s
approach would allow Congress to “achieve through jurisdiction stripping what it cannot permissibly
achieve outright” without unconstitutionally usurping the judiciary’s authority—“namely, directing entry
of a judgment for a particular party” in a pending case. As a result, four members of the Court (namely
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Justice Sotomayor and the three dissenting Justices) concluded that the Gun Lake Act could not pass
constitutional muster as a jurisdiction-stripping statute, while an equal number (namely the four Justices
in the plurality) believed that it could. Moreover, because only four Justices agreed that the Gun Lake Act
was most plausibly read as a jurisdiction-stripping statute—rather than as a restoration of sovereign
immunity (as the concurring Justices believed) or as an unconstitutional statute directing a particular
substantive result in a pending case (as the dissenting Justices believed)—it remains unclear exactly what
language Congress must use to divest federal courts of jurisdiction over a particular matter without
running afoul of the Constitution. Thus, although Patchak and earlier cases like Bank Markazi signal that
Congress possesses considerable authority to bar federal courts from hearing certain kinds of lawsuits, the
precise boundaries of that authority presently remain unsettled.
Patchak has potentially important implications for the doctrine of sovereign immunity as well. The
concurring Justices’ opinions signal that, after a federal court decides that the United States has waived its
immunity from a particular lawsuit, Congress possesses broad authority to undo that court’s decision by
enacting a statute directing the court to dismiss the case. The concurrences further imply that, because the
Gun Lake Act does not explicitly mention “sovereign immunity,” Congress need not use magic words to
modify the government’s sovereign immunity.
In sum, while Patchak’s ultimate impact on Congress presently appears uncertain, the decision at least
reinforces the importance of carefully considering the impact that proposed legislation may have on the
crucial balance of powers between the legislative branch and the judiciary.
Author Information
Kevin M. Lewis
Legislative Attorney
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