Diversity Jurisdiction Research Articles

Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837–1857 (review)

Reviewed by: Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837–1857 Keith E. Whittington Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837–1857. By Austin Allen . ( Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. Pp. 288. Cloth $59.95; paper $22.95.) In the U.S. Supreme Court's 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, the justices barred Congress from prohibiting slavery in the western territories and sought to end the growing turmoil that had already torn apart the Whig party and launched the Republican party. Austin Allen has found a new and intriguing angle on the infamous Dred Scott case. Allen seeks to place Dred Scott "in its judicial context," in the context of the ideas, concerns, and bodies of law that the Supreme Court had been building up over several decades, rather than in the more familiar and immediate context of the sectional and partisan politics of 1857. It is in the latter context that Republicans at the time, including Abraham Lincoln, cast the decision, and it is in that context that the decision has stood as an example of misguided and unwarranted "judicial activism." Allen does not go so far as to argue that this externalist account is irrelevant, but he aptly demonstrates the power of an internalist account that filters political considerations through the web of law. In particular, Allen shows the connections between Dred Scott and the Court's developing jurisprudence relating to slavery, economic development, and the jurisdiction of the federal courts. In many ways, Allen argues, the Court's difficulty began with its decision in Swift v. Tyson in 1842. Swift concerned the choice of law to be applied in diversity cases, cases that entered the federal court system because they involved parties from more than one state. Beginning with Swift, the justices developed an increasingly robust federal common law that trumped relevant state law in the cases that were decided in federal court. There was a substantial attraction in this development for the commercial cases with which Swift was primarily concerned, but it created at least two difficulties. In order to trigger federal diversity jurisdiction under the U.S. [End Page 415] Constitution, the parties to the lawsuit must be citizens from different states. Corporations, artificial entities created by state law, were at best analogous to citizens, but if they were going to be efficiently and effectively brought under the protective umbrella of federal diversity jurisdiction they would have to be given "quasi-citizen" status by the Court (130). But if corporations could be recognized as a kind of citizen entitled to federal rights and access to federal courts, Southern justices well recognized, then free blacks might as well. In the context of commercial law, the Taney Court was willing to trump state policies so as to facilitate the development of a national and vibrant commercial republic. In the context of slavery and social policy generally, however, the Court wanted to defer to local law in most circumstances. The Missouri courts had ruled that Dred Scott was a slave, despite the time he had spent in free territory, and under other circumstances the Taney Court would defer to Missouri's judgment and easily dismiss the case. Dred Scott's lawyer, however, hoped to take advantage of the loophole created by the Court's diversity jurisdiction. If Dred Scott's case could be heard under diversity jurisdiction, then the federal courts could not simply defer to the state courts. They would have to hear such cases and rule on them independently. In Allen's telling, the Dred Scott case is the Taney Court's effort to close that loophole by denying that blacks could be citizens, or quasi-citizens, and forcing them into state courts for whatever disposition state law would provide. Ironically, Dred Scott would then be a case in which the Supreme Court was trying to avoid future entanglements with the slavery issue, rather than a case in which the Court was trying to impose a final (proslavery) solution. This is an inventive and provocative thesis (suggesting, for example, that Dred Scott would allow territorial legislatures, but not Congress, to prohibit slavery...

Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837–1857 (review)

Reviewed by: Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837-1857 Kyle G. Volk (bio) Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837–1857. By Austin Allen. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006. Pp. 274. Cloth, $59.95; Paper, $22.95.) Austin Allen provides us with a new way to understand why United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney notoriously ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) that black Americans were not citizens of the United States and that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories. He suggests that our dominant interpretations, which characterize (and condemn) Taney's opinion as a work of sectional partisanship and judicial overreaching, have too closely followed the partisan Republican critique that emerged in the decision's immediate aftermath. As a result, scholars have not taken seriously other reasons why Taney issued a ruling that today strikes us as so morally problematic. Rather than seeing the decision as a judicial response to an external crisis over slavery, Allen argues that Taney's opinion was as much a product of the court resolving its own internal crisis. Allen situates Dred Scott within the doctrinal web that the Taney Court created in the previous twenty years, and he makes a solid case that Taney's ruling was an unintended consequence of a court divided by a number of issues, only one of which was slavery and some of which are surprising. This book makes an important contribution not only to our understanding of Dred Scott but also to our knowledge of the Taney Court and its relationship to antebellum American society. Allen's work comprises nine chapters arranged in three sections. The first two sections unearth the contexts he sees as vital to understanding [End Page 511] Taney's ruling, while the third discusses Dred Scott as shaped by these contexts. One of the strengths of Allen's work is his treatment of the Taney Court as an institution with an identity, and in the first section he lays out the ideological and cultural conditions shaping the court and its jurisprudence. Though attentive to the internal dissent that made the Taney Court far less unified than the Marshall Court, Allen exposes how Taney Court members—many of them partisan Democrats—collectively wrestled with the court's role in a legal and political system predicated on popular sovereignty. Allen suggests that the court conceived of itself as a facilitator of self-rule, and he distills two general manifestations. First, in constitutional cases the court strove to balance its general deference to state legislatures with the protection of the supremacy of federal authority. Second, in private law cases the court displayed concern for social order in a self-governing society and applied common-law rules to compel individuals to stand by market obligations. These two broad commitments collided in Swift v. Tyson (1842), a case that came to the court through its diversity jurisdiction by which it was authorized to hear cases involving parties from different states. In Swift, the court, led by Joseph Story, issued a highly nationalistic ruling that invented a federal common law of commerce to guide its adjudication of commercial disputes between citizens of different states. Though Swift did not involve slavery, Allen shows that it carried clear antislavery implications. It inaugurated a new trend in which the court would be less deferential to state policy and state court opinions in diversity suits. When Dred Scott reached the court through diversity jurisdiction, it was difficult for the court simply to defer to the Missouri Supreme Court that ruled that Scott remained a slave despite having traveled in free territory. Developments in diversity begun in Swift pushed the court to a more substantive ruling in Dred Scott. Allen's second section contains his most interesting contributions. First, he details the conflict-ridden development of the court's method of handling cases involving slavery outside of diversity jurisdiction. This method, which matured in Strader v. Graham (1851), was to defer to state law by asserting a lack of jurisdiction. Commentators have puzzled over why Taney opted for such a broad ruling in Dred Scott...

Institutions, Interests, and Judicial Outcomes

Since 1789, diversity of citizenship jurisdiction has been a staple of the American judicial system. After presenting a general theory of jurisdictional change and reviewing diversity jurisdiction's development, the author undertakes a quantitative analysis of congressional activity vis-à-vis diversity jurisdiction. That analysis provides evidence that both administrative concerns and attention to federal judicial outcomes have impacted legislative decisions concerning the scope of diversity jurisdiction. These findings also suggest that members of Congress are selective in dealing with the jurisdiction of federal courts and that approaches to jurisdictional oversight vary in response to the salience of the legal issues at hand.

Resolution of Bias: Tort Diversity Cases in the United States Courts of Appeals

The ability of federal courts to hear, through the grant of diversity jurisdiction, cases typically found in state court jurisdiction has stirred controversy since the Judiciary Act of 1789. Whether federal judges presiding in diversity-of-citizenship cases are striving to eliminate the real or perceived biases in state courts against out-of-state parties and whether these same judges are applying the proper state law are of great concern. While these issues have been hotly contested, they have not been empirically tested. This article examines the votes of United States Courts of Appeals judges in tort diversity cases to test these claims. Through this analysis, it appears that these federal courts are in fact not only rendering unbiased decisions, but also settling these disputes based on applicable state law, thereby holding true to principles of federalism.

Federal Court Certification of State-Law Questions: Active Judicial Federalism

Judicial federalism?the sharing of jurisdiction and interpretive authority between the state and federal courts?poses tremendous challenges to courts attempting to resolve individual disputes in an increasingly complex legal landscape. As a practical matter, state judges must regularly interpret and apply federal statutory and constitu tional law, while both supplemental and diversity jurisdiction bring state statutory, constitutional, and common-law issues to federal judges. In most cases, a judge apply ing the law of another jurisdiction can look to court decisions from that jurisdiction for guidance, but when no such guidance exists, judges are forced to put themselves in the shoes of another. State court judges are generally left to their own devices and cannot avoid inter preting federal laws, even when doing so presents a matter of first impression. Federal court judges, on the other hand, have a number of weapons in their arsenal that let them avoid prediction of unsettled state-law questions. First, under certain circum stances, a federal court exercising federal-question jurisdiction may decline to exer cise supplemental jurisdiction over state-law claims, thus forcing the parties to litigate their dispute in both state and federal court. Second, under relatively rare circumstances, a federal court may invoke the abstention mechanism first described by the Supreme Court in Railroad Commission of Texas v. Pullman Co. (1941). Specifically, Pullman abstention is appropriate when resolution of a state-law question may eliminate the need for a federal court to address a federal constitutional question. When Pullman abstention is properly invoked, the federal court stays further proceedings on the case before it while the parties file a declaratory judgment action in state court; the federal court retains jurisdiction over the federal claims but stays its hand until the state-law question wends its way through the entire state court process. Finally, federal court judges may retain jurisdiction over all claims, state and federal, and bypass the unwieldy Pullman process by going straight to those responsi ble for declaring state law: federal judges may certify novel questions of state law directly to the state s highest court. Federal courts have been quick to point out this particular advantage of certification in Pullman abstention cases like Be?lotti v. Baird (1976) and Gnffin Hospital v. The Commission on Hospitals and Healthcare (1986). Forty-seven states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico have some provision of state law, in either a statute or a court rule, that allows the highest court in the state to answer legal questions certified by federal courts. At first blush, the procedure appears to be the ultimate act of deference to the sovereignty of states and the sanctity of state law. As one commentator remarked, "[T]he availability of certification produces a weird sort of security patrol in which federal courts surveil the border between the [state and federal] systems and from time to time repel their own attempts to invade the province of state law" (Selya,

Overhearing Part of a Conversation: Shutts as a Moment in a Long Dialogue

Phillips Petroleum v. Shutts, the topic of a recent symposium, looks backwards as well as forwards. In its backwards-looking aspect Shutts suggests what federal diversity jurisdiction might have become. In its forward-looking aspect Shutts suggests the problems that will arise under the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005. This essay uses Shutts to sketch a new role for diversity jurisdiction, and it uses Shutts' facts to explain how we might begin to resolve the issues that CAFA will create.

Overlooked in the Tort Reform Debate: The Growth of Erroneous Removal

Disputes over forum often center on whether a case should proceed in state or federal court. Removal to federal court can trigger a costly forum struggle. When a state case is removed to federal court only to be sent back to state court, the time and resources incurred in the detour are a toll on the judicial system and waste parties’ resources. We find erroneous removal to be an increasing problem. From 1993 to 2002, a period when state tort filings noticeably decreased, the number of removed diversity tort cases increased by about 10 percent to about 8,900 per year. By 2003, removed cases comprised over 30 percent of the federal diversity docket. The percentage of removals ultimately remanded to state court increased significantly to about 20 percent in 2003, with the remand rate exceeding 50 percent in some districts. Thus, as more cases purporting to satisfy diversity jurisdiction were being removed to federal court, and just as removals were occupying an increasing part of the federal docket, removed cases were being remanded to state court at increasing rates. Erroneous removal is a growing phenomenon that should be addressed as part of serious consideration of tort reform.

Roots, Routes, And Rootedness: Diversity, Migration, and Toleration in Mid-Atlantic Pluralism

Roots, Routes, And RootednessDiversity, Migration, and Toleration in Mid-Atlantic Pluralism Ned C. Landsman One of the most often cited descriptions of mid-Atlantic society ever penned appeared in 1782, in Letters from an American Farmer, written some years before by the French-born writer and New York inhabitant J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. In the third letter of that volume, the author, posing as a farmer in Pennsylvania, asked the famous question, "What is the American?" He provided the following answer: He is either an European, or the descendant of an European; hence the strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now wives of four different nations. . . . Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.1 There are many questions one could ask about the Farmer's description—about nations and groups in the mid-Atlantic, about the nature of family life in the region, even about the gendered connotations of the concept of a new race of men. But the aspect that has always attracted the most attention has been the description of the mixing of peoples, long considered to be among [End Page 267] the classic statements of American pluralism. It is fitting that such a passage was penned by an inhabitant of the mid-Atlantic, for there, more than anywhere else in British America, one found early and extensive intermingling of diverse groups of settlers—English, Dutch, French, Scots, Irish, Swedes, Finns, Jews, and German-speakers from diverse jurisdictions—along with similarly varied African and Native American peoples, who Crèvecoeur failed to mention. There one found as well the most often-noted system of religious toleration in British America, if not the whole of the Western world. The Middle-Colony region surely was, in Michael Zuckerman's apt phrase, "America's First Plural Society."2 The prevalence of toleration and pluralism in the region by no means describes all there is to know about diversity in the mid-Atlantic. Implicit in the Farmer's description is not only the fact of the intermixing of peoples in the region, but several different portrayals of how they mixed. In the passage cited above, the Farmer wrote of people of many nationalities "melted into a new race," a phrase that seems to anticipate depictions of America as a melting pot, in which immigrants from diverse backgrounds came to adopt a common culture. Yet at other times the Farmer described people of varying beliefs and habits living side by side, suggesting that those peoples were not really melted together at all. In those passages, the Farmer emphasized instead the toleration of difference, a society in which religious and cultural variety flourished. Moreover, there were clear limits to the author's general sense of inclusion. If the Farmer viewed Americans as assembled from "all nations," both the language and context make abundantly clear that the "nations" to which he referred were entirely restricted to northern and western Europe. The ambiguities that appear in the Farmer's presentation had existed within the region almost from the beginning. For if toleration and diversity were among the distinguishing characteristics of the Middle Colonies, the ways in which people mixed—the degrees of integration and inclusion, the extent of liberty and tolerance, and the general character of the groups themselves—were quite varied. There were in fact several rather different varieties of pluralism present in the mid-Atlantic, ranging from an apparently large degree of intermixing that often appeared to reduce distinctions among people to a pluralism comprising diverse communities, sometimes living side by side, but with only limited interaction among them. Religious accommodation within the region also varied, from the limited and often grudging acceptance of doctrinal and denominational difference known as toleration to [End Page 268] something much closer to true tolerance and full religious liberty. If the Middle Colonies were in fact precursors of American pluralism, that is because all of those forms would have significant echoes later in...

Valuation of Diversity Jurisdiction Claims in the Federal Courts

Valuation of Diversity Jurisdiction Claims in the Federal Courts

Beyond Formalism in Foreign Affairs: A Functional Approach to the Alien Tort Statute

This paper discusses the functional ability of federal courts to incorporate customary international law (CIL) through the vehicle of the Alien Tort Statute. In last Term's Sosa v. Alvarez Machain, the Supreme Court concluded that the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) is merely a jurisdictional statute, but also refused to stop the lower courts from allowing aliens to seek damages in federal court for certain international law violations. We use the Court's under-theorized conclusion as an opportunity to move beyond largely inconclusive formalist debates about the ATS's text, structure, and history. Instead, we conduct a comparative institutional analysis of the role of the courts and the executive in foreign affairs. This functional approach suggests that the executive branch can more effectively achieve the purpose behind the ATS. Critics of this approach have argued that a jurisdictional approach to the ATS would disrupt American foreign relations by allowing the states, rather than a single federal judiciary, to make and enforce CIL. The Court's recent decisions, however, address this concern by permitting presidential declarations of international policy to preempt state law. Thus, CIL could continue as part of the common law of the states enforceable in state court or through diversity jurisdiction in federal court subject to federal preemption by the President.

The Hidden Bias in Diversity Jurisdiction

Commentators have repeatedly debated the continued viability of diversity jurisdiction. These debates have tended to focus on two points: the existence of local bias (which contributes to arguments favoring the retention of diversity jurisdiction) and the workload of the federal courts (which contributes to arguments favoring the abolition of diversity jurisdiction). What has been missed in this debate is that, far from being an antidote to local bias, diversity jurisdiction today embodies, and indeed promotes, a form of bias by its very existence - a bias against rural areas so pervasive as to require the abolition of diversity jurisdiction.

The Alien Tort Statute and Article III

In 1789, Congress enacted the First Judiciary Act, a statute that established the federal courts and regulated their jurisdiction and structure. Section 9 of the Act, which regulated the jurisdiction of the federal district courts, provided, among other things, that these courts shall also have cognizance, concurrent with the courts of the several States, or the circuit courts, as the case may be, of all causes where an alien sues for a tort only in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States. This paper considers Congress's likely intent in enacting this provision, known today as the Alien Tort Statute. In particular, the paper focuses on Congress's likely understanding of the relationship between the Alien Tort Statute and Article III of the Constitution. The paper concludes that Congress did not understand the Alien Tort Statute as creating a federal statutory cause of action. The paper also concludes that, although Congress expected that courts would apply the law of nations as a rule of decision in appropriate cases, it did not view the law of nations as part of the Laws of the United States referred to in Article III. As a result of these two conclusions, Congress would not have understood law of nations cases brought under the Alien Tort Statute as falling within Article III federal question jurisdiction. The federal question construction of the Statute adopted by the Second Circuit in its famous international human rights law decision, Filartiga v. Pena-Irala, is therefore wrong, at least as a matter of original statutory intent. Instead, the paper argues, Congress probably understood the Alien Tort Statute as part of its implementation of Article III alienage diversity jurisdiction. If so, either Congress mistakenly believed that suits between two aliens would fall within alienage diversity jurisdiction, or it believed that suits brought under the Alien Tort Statute would involve at least one U.S. defendant. The weight of the historical evidence, the paper argues, favors the latter conclusion.

Upsetting the Balance between Adverse Interests: The Impact of the Supreme Court's Trilogy on Expert Testimony in Toxic Tort Litigation

MARGARET A. BERGER [*] I INTRODUCTION In 1948, in Michelson v. United States, [1] Justice Jackson declined to modify the common law rules on character evidence. He warned that [t]o pull one misshapen stone out of the grotesque structure is more likely simply to upset its present balance between adverse interests than to establish a rational edifice. [2] Justice Jackson's comment is worth pondering in a very different context. Beginning in 1993, the Supreme Court, in a trilogy of opinions, has explicitly sought to rationalize the law on expert testimony. [3] This article examines Justice Jackson's prediction that a change in an evidentiary rule may realign the balance that previously existed between adverse interests. My inquiry is limited to toxic tort cases for a number of reasons. First, these are the cases that drove the demand for expert testimony reform. [4] These are the cases that produced allegations about venal experts who bring junk into the courtroom [5] and that seem to have piqued the Supreme Court's interest in expert proof perhaps because of the huge amounts of damages and transaction costs at stake. [6] The first two opinions in the trilogy deal with the admissibility of expert proof on causation in toxic tort cases. Second, Justice Jackson's thesis seems applicable to toxic tort litigation because the trilogy may be leading some district court judges to exclude experts proffered by plaintiffs on the issue of causation who previously would have been permitted to testify. [7] The Federal Judicial Center conducted surveys in 1991 and 1998 asking federal judges and attorneys about expert testimony. In the 1991 survey, seventy-five percent of the judges reported admitting all proffered expert testim ony. By 1998, only fifty-nine percent indicated that they admitted all proffered expert testimony without limitation. Furthermore, sixty-five percent of plaintiff and defendant counsel stated that judges are less likely to admit some types of expert testimony since Daubert. [8] Without the means to prove causation, which is always a crucial element of the plaintiff's case, the plaintiff must lose, and the litigation ends with summary judgment for the defendant. The consequence, according to some observers, [9] is that toxic tort law is being reformulated in the federal courts to the advantage of defendants, a result that accords with Justice Jackson's predictions about the impact an evidentiary change may have. This article seeks to uncover the various ingredients that have contributed to this result. Part II contains an overview of the trilogy on expert proof and examines its message for the federal district judge. Part III examines the unstated assumptions some federal courts are making about science that affect a judge's rulings on the admissibility of plaintiffs' expert testimony. Part IV deals with a striking paradox. As every first-year law student knows, the Erie doctrine [10] requires a federal judge who sits in diversity jurisdiction to apply state substantive law. Toxic tort cases almost invariably come into federal court on the basis of diversity jurisdiction. Nevertheless, federal courts have ignored Erie in ruling on the admissibility of plaintiffs' experts, even in situations in which sensitivity to state law would seem appropriate under current Supreme Court jurisprudence, but have relied on Erie to convert rulings on the admissibility of evidence into determinations about the sufficiency of the evid ence. This conflating of sufficiency and admissibility began before the recent amendment to Rule 702, which added a sufficiency requirement to the rule. [11] Finally, Part V considers how the trilogy on the admissibility of expert proof has intersected with the Supreme Court's previous trilogy on summary judgment to move final adjudication in the toxic tort case from the trial to the pretrial stage, and from jury consideration to a decision by the judge. …

Federalism and the Processes of Governance in Hurst's Legal History

“The more important any legal theme is in United States history,” Willard Hurst once wrote, “the more likely it is that it has been significantly affected by the coexistence and interplay of the national and the state governments.” That federalism and its impact on legal development should have been of central importance to Hurst's interpretations of American history is by no means surprising, yet the subject seldom finds a place in the growing literature on Hurst's seminal research contributions. His estimate of federalism's importance may no doubt be explained in part by the close relationship that he had with Felix Frankfurter as the research assistant in 1935–36 for Frankfurter's book of lectures on the Commerce Clause in the nineteenth century. This was a study animated, one can be certain, by Frankfurter's interest in finding ample room within the constitutional order for giving the states adequate space to pursue their varied individual policy preferences in response to the challenges posed by economic and social change. Indeed, Frankfurter had long been struggling with the issue of what authority was left, by a proper interpretation of constitutional federalism, to the state legislatures and courts; and he must have been pleased when Hurst wrote to him in 1938 that he was thinking about undertaking a historical study of diversity jurisdiction as a way of getting “a slant on the business of making federalism work.”

Child abuse and neglect:A National Summary Of State Statutes

ABSTRACTEffective court improvements must be based on comprehensive, baseline analysis of state child abuse and neglect statutes. This information will provide policy makers with improved tracking and evaluation opportunities as significant statutory changes are contemplated in pending federal initiatives and state court improvement activities. This article provides excerpts of a comprehensive national study undertaken to determine the level of uniformity or variance in statutes since the initiation of federal legislation attempting to improve state practice in the handling of child abuse and neglect cases. The state‐by‐state information is designed to provide diverse jurisdictions with an opportunity for comparative statutory analysis. The complete, 50 state Matrix of State Statutes Pertaining to Child Abuse, Neglect and Dependency is scheduled for publication later this year.

Judicial Restraint and Constitutional Federalism: The Supreme Court's "Lopez" and "Seminole Tribe" Decisions

The Senate hearings considering Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination called new attention the Constitution's Commerce Clause. That concern might seem odd, given the typical lack of strong grassroots concern over the power. But the 2010 election year is different. One characteristic of the largely conservative Tea Party movement is a wish roll back Constitutional time the regime envisioned by its founders. As the New York Times reported in early July, 2010, members of the movement believe that the “commerce clause in particular has been pushed beyond recognition.” Members of the movement imagine that Congressional power over the strictly requires two things. First, the action must relate commercial exchange. Second, the transaction must be interstate, involving participants or activities that actually cross a state line.The first of these views must be qualified and the second is incorrect. In the late eighteenth century the word frequently had a broader meaning than mere trade. The framers' own repeated use of the phrase or commerce indicated that trade and were different things and could include both manufacturing and even “mutual dealings in common life,” as Webster put it in his 1828 American Dictionary.The phrase among” the several states was certainly not intended be limited transactions that crossed a state line. If the framers had so intended they would used the word between as they did in the diversity jurisdiction clause, where they contemplated legal process flowing from a plaintiff in one state a defendant in a different state. Eighteenth century writers distinguished the terms between and among much more carefully than we do today. Commerce among the states had the same meaning as John Dickinson's Letters From a Farmer arguing for repeal of export duties on goods made in the colonies, “for so doing may promote manufactures them. Or an 1800 writer in the Hartford Connecticut Courant could write that the states of Pennsylvania and New York have many men of intrigue and talents them. And New York Convention delegate Robert Yates could speak of the Articles of Confederation as intended to preserve peace the states. When the framers wanted speak about a transaction or event that crossed from state A state B they used between. When they wanted speak of an activity or state of affairs generally occurring within a certain area or areas they used among.

Litigation and Inequality: Federal Diversity Jurisdiction in Industrial America, 1870-1958.

Litigation and Inequality: Federal Diversity Jurisdiction in Industrial America, 1870-1958.

Litigation and Inequality: Federal Diversity Jurisdiction in Industrial America, 1870-1958.

Litigation and Inequality: Federal Diversity Jurisdiction in Industrial America, 1870-1958.

Litigation and Inequality: Federal Diversity Jurisdiction in Industrial America, 1870-1958

Journal Article Litigation and Inequality: Federal Diversity Jurisdiction in Industrial America, 1870–1958 Get access Purcell Edward A.Jr., Litigation and Inequality: Federal Diversity Jurisdiction in Industrial America, 1870–1958. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. x, 446 pp. $59.00. Eric A. Chiappinelli Eric A. Chiappinelli University of Puget Sound, School of Law Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar American Journal of Legal History, Volume 38, Issue 3, July 1994, Pages 387–388, https://doi.org/10.2307/845400 Published: 01 July 1994

Litigation and Inequality: Federal Diversity Jurisdiction in Industrial America, 1870-1958.

Litigation and Inequality: Federal Diversity Jurisdiction in Industrial America, 1870-1958.