The great theoretical debate in Fed Courts, which we save until the end of the semester, is Congress' power to "jurisdiction strip"--to limit the jurisdiction of the lower courts and/or SCOTUS through the Exceptions Clause). A case argued before the Court yesterday may raise those issues. This post from Prof. Dorf (Cornell) analyzes some of the jurisdiction-stripping issues. This is for later in the semester.
He also offers a nice way of understanding something we talked about already--How to understand what Congress does when it uses its exceptions power to enact a statute framed as granting the Court jurisdiction:
The Judiciary Act of 1789 and most subsequent legislation is phrased as conferring jurisdiction on the Supreme Court, but that's misleading. As the Court explained in Murdock v. Memphis, when Congress purports to confer less jurisdiction on the Supreme Court than what is set out in Article III, it is in essence exercising power under the Exceptions Clause to change the default. The default would be that the Supreme Court has, in the words of Article III, jurisdiction over "all" federal question cases. So, for example, the fact that Congress changed some of the Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction from mandatory to discretionary via certiorari was an exercise of the Exceptions Clause power. And with the certiorari jurisdiction, the Court can resolve all circuit splits even though it has less jurisdiction than it would have if Congress had not exercised some of its power under the Exceptions Clause.
