CRS Reports – Week of 10-26-24 – Supreme Court Jurisdiction

This week the Congressional Research Service (CRS) published a report on: “The Exceptions Clause and Congressional Control over Supreme Court Jurisdiction”. The report looks at the constitutional differences between the different types of cases that the Supreme Court may here. It describes the cases over which the Court has ‘original jurisdiction’, cases that are brought directly to the Court dealing with Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party. All other cases reach the Court on appeal of judgements of the lessor courts. It takes special pains to discuss the fact that the Constitution limits those appeals under the ‘Exceptions Clause’ (Article III, Section 2, Clause 2) by making those appeals subject to ““such Exceptions, and … Regulations as the Congress shall make”.

The ‘Considerations for Congress’ section of the report is much more detailed than typically seen in these CRS reports. Instead of laying out specific actions that Congress could/should consider in respect to this topic, the Report continues the legal discussion about practical limits on the topics Congress could expect try to address in regulating the topics of potential litigation before the Court.

To anyone that has taken any courses on constitutional law (and I have taken a handful of undergraduate courses when I was a political science major), this discussion is hardly unusual, but for most folks (including the majority of congresscritters) it demonstrates how complicated these matters can get. Still, this relatively short report (20 pages) is well worth reading.