Ryan C. Williams

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v90.4
Jurisdiction as Power
Ryan C. Williams
Assistant Professor, Boston College Law School.

My thanks to William Baude, Kevin Clermont, Scott Dodson, Benjamin Eidelson, and Evan Tsen Lee, and to participants at workshops at Boston College Law School and the Seventh Annual Civil Procedure Workshop for helpful comments on earlier drafts.

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Article
Volume 89.7
Jurisdiction as Power
Ryan C. Williams
Assistant Professor, Boston College Law School.

My thanks to William Baude, Kevin Clermont, Scott Dodson, Benjamin Eidelson, and Evan Tsen Lee, and to partici- pants at workshops at Boston College Law School and the Seventh Annual Civil Procedure Workshop for helpful comments on earlier drafts.

For centuries, courts and legal commentators defined “jurisdiction” by reference to a court’s “power.” A court that lacked jurisdiction, under this conception, simply lacked the ability to bind the parties, and its resulting rulings could therefore be regarded by both litigants and later courts as void and of no legal effect. But in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court and other U.S. courts strongly embraced the so-called bootstrap doctrine—a distinctive branch of preclusion law that severely limits the ability to collaterally attack a judgment based on a claimed lack of jurisdiction. Because the bootstrap doctrine effectively allows courts to establish their own jurisdiction simply by concluding that they possess it, critics of the power-based conception contend that the definition no longer provides a descriptively plausible or conceptually coherent account of jurisdiction’s identity. This Article defends the traditional power-based conception of jurisdiction’s identity as both conceptually coherent and normatively desirable.