Appellate Jurisdiction

• Author: Kenneth L. Karst
• Pages: 108-109

Page 108

A court's appellate jurisdiction is its power to review the actions of another body, usually a lower court. The appellate jurisdiction of our federal courts lies within the control of Congress. Article III of the Constitution, after establishing the Supreme Court's ORIGINAL JURISDICTION over certain cases, gives the Court appellate jurisdiction over all other types of cases within "the JUDICIAL POWER OF THE UNITED STATES " but empowers Congress to make "exceptions and regulations" governing that jurisdiction. In the JUDICIARY ACT OF 1789 Congress did not, formally, make exceptions to the Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction; rather it purported to grant the Court jurisdiction to hear various types of cases on WRIT OF ERROR. The assumption has been that such an affirmative grant of appellate jurisdiction over specified types of cases is, by implication, an "exception," excluding the Court from taking appellate jurisdiction over cases not mentioned.

The Supreme Court itself accepted this line of reasoning in EX PARTE MCCARDLE (1869), stating that without a statutory grant of appellate jurisdiction it had no power to hear a case. Read broadly, this holding empowers Congress to undermine JUDICIAL REVIEW by withdrawing the Supreme Court's most important functions. Some commentators argue that Congress, in controlling the Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction, is constitutionally bound to respect the Court's essential role in a system of SEPARATION OF POWERS. Other writers, however, reject this view, and the Supreme Court has been presented with no modern occasion to face the issue. (See JUDICIAL SYSTEM.)

Whatever the Constitution may ultimately require, Congress has acted on the assumption that it need not extend the Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction to occupy the whole of the judicial power established by Article III. Until 1925, for example, the Court's appellate review of civil cases was limited by a requirement of a certain dollar amount in controversy. For the first century of the Court's existence, it had no general appellate jurisdiction over federal criminal cases, but reviewed such a case only on writ of HABEAS CORPUS or upon a lower court's certification of a division of opinion on an issue of law. Until 1914, the Supreme Court could review state court decisions only when they denied claims of federal right, not when they validated those claims. Although all these major limitations on the Court's...