Article III Cases, State Court Duties, and the Madisonian Compromise
![handle is hein.journals/wlr1995 and id is 55 raw text is: ARTICLES
ARTICLE i CASES,
STATE COURT DUTIES, AND
THE MADISONIAN COMPROMISE
MICHAEL G. COLLINS*
Traditional federal courts scholarship holds that state couls are empowered to
hear, and that they have certain duties to hear, Article III cases and controversies.
Support for this position is thought to be provided in part by the historical events
culminating in the Madisonian Compromise-the decision at the Constitutional
Convention to leave the creation of lower federal courts to Congress rather than to
require them in the Constitution. Thus, if there had been no lower federal courts, most
Article l business would have had to be heard in the state courts in the first instance
if it was to be heard at all. In this Article, the author questions the historical accuracy
of these fundamental assumptions about state court powers and duties, including the
traditional interpretation of the Compromise. He shows that among those who framed,
ratified, and implemented Article Ill, there was a pervasive belief that state courts were
not, in fact, constitutionally able to hear all Article m] business; further, the prevailing
assumption was that they ordinarily had no obligation to assume unwanted jurisdiction,
the Supremacy Clause notwithstanding. These widely shared founding-era beliefs,
unconventional by modem standards and difficult to reconcile with the Compromise,
even led some to conclude that federal courts were constitutionally required after all.
Following an historical reexamination of the events surrounding the framing of
Article III, the author concludes that the force of the Madisonian Compromise was lost
on the early Republic because the compromise was probably never viewed as the
simple agreement that we now think it was. These reconceived original understandings
about the role of state courts in the implementation of Article III cast new light on the
Supreme Court's shifting approach to the problem of state court jurisdictional autonomy
and on Congress's (and the Court's) ability to reshape state court jurisdictional agendas
to accommodate the enforcement of federal law. More importantly, the revisionist
approach to the Madisonian Compromise provided by the author suggests that a number
of other fundamental tenets of federal courts law that are premised on the Compromise
may need to be reexamined as well.
* AssociateProfessor of Law, Tulane University. B.A., Pomona College; M.A.,
Stanford; J.D., Harvard. I would like to thank Adeno Addis, Akhil Amar, Barry
Friedman, Gary Lawson, Richard Matasar, Jefferson Powell, Suzanna Sherry, Keith
Werhan and Ann Woolhandler for comments on earlier drafts.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/wlr1995&div=12&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Article III Cases, State Court Duties, and the Madisonian Compromise
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