Judicial Review and Justiciability: every key term you need (+ practice quiz)
25 flashcard terms for Constitutional Law Topic 1, written to match the course framework. Study them here, then drill them as interactive flashcards, or test yourself with the 15-question quiz — free, no account needed.
The power of federal courts to decide whether an act of Congress, an executive action, or a state law conflicts with the Constitution and to refuse to give it effect. It is inferred from the judicial duty to say what the law is.
Marbury v. Madison
The 1803 decision holding that Congress could not enlarge the Supreme Court's original jurisdiction beyond the categories listed in Article III, and that a court faced with a statute repugnant to the Constitution must follow the Constitution.
Martin v. Hunter's Lessee
Upheld Supreme Court appellate review of state court judgments resting on federal law, reasoning that uniform interpretation of federal law would be impossible if each state supreme court had the last word.
Supremacy Clause
The provision in Article VI making the Constitution, federal statutes, and treaties the supreme law of the land, binding state judges regardless of contrary state constitutions or laws.
Original jurisdiction
The categories of cases the Supreme Court may hear in the first instance under Article III, chiefly suits affecting ambassadors and those in which a state is a party. Congress may neither add to nor subtract from this list.
Appellate jurisdiction
The Supreme Court's authority to review decisions of lower federal courts and of state courts on federal questions, subject to whatever exceptions and regulations Congress chooses to make.
Exceptions Clause
The clause of Article III letting Congress make exceptions to the Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction. Its outer limit is contested, since proposals to strip jurisdiction over disfavored subjects raise unresolved questions about interfering with the judicial function.
Ex parte McCardle
Sustained repeal of a statute authorizing habeas appeals even while an appeal was pending, illustrating that Congress may withdraw appellate jurisdiction it has conferred, though the opinion stressed that other avenues of review remained open.
Adequate and independent state ground
The doctrine barring Supreme Court review when a state judgment rests on state law that is both sufficient to support the result and unentangled from federal law, because any federal ruling would then be advisory.
Michigan v. Long
Adopted a presumption that a state judgment discussing federal law rests on federal grounds unless the state court states plainly that its decision has an independent and adequate state basis.
Case or controversy requirement
The Article III limit confining federal courts to concrete adversary disputes. It generates the standing, ripeness, mootness, and political question rules and forbids advisory opinions.
Advisory opinion
A court's abstract legal advice unconnected to a live dispute between adverse parties. Federal courts have refused to give such opinions since the Justices declined to answer President Washington's questions in 1793.
Standing
The requirement that a plaintiff personally show an injury in fact, causation traceable to the defendant, and redressability by a favorable ruling. It asks who may sue rather than whether the claim has merit.
Injury in fact
A harm that is concrete and particularized and actual or imminent rather than conjectural. Aesthetic, environmental, and some intangible harms qualify if the plaintiff is personally affected.
Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife
Held that members who intended someday to revisit foreign project sites lacked imminent injury, and rejected the idea that a statutory citizen-suit provision by itself can manufacture Article III standing.
Spokeo v. Robins
Clarified that a bare procedural violation of a statute is not automatically an injury; the plaintiff must show the violation worked a concrete harm, though intangible harms with historical analogues can count.
Generalized grievance
A complaint about government illegality shared equally by all citizens or taxpayers. It is normally not a judicially cognizable injury and is left to the political process.
Flast v. Cohen
Carved a narrow taxpayer standing exception for challenges to congressional spending said to violate the Establishment Clause. Later decisions declined to extend it to executive spending or to tax credits.
Third-party standing
An exception allowing a litigant with her own injury to assert the rights of absent parties when she has a close relationship with them and they face practical obstacles to suing on their own behalf.
Organizational standing
An association may sue for its members when a member would have standing, the interests are germane to the group's purpose, and neither the claim nor the relief requires individual member participation.
Ripeness
The doctrine barring premature adjudication. Courts weigh the fitness of the issues for review against the hardship of withholding decision, and pre-enforcement challenges require a credible threat of enforcement.
Mootness
The rule that a live controversy must persist through every stage of litigation. Exceptions cover harms capable of repetition yet evading review, voluntary cessation, and properly certified class actions.
Political question doctrine
The principle that some issues are committed by the Constitution to the political branches or lack judicially manageable standards, such as impeachment procedures, partisan gerrymandering, and the guarantee of a republican form of government.
Baker v. Carr
Held legislative malapportionment justiciable under the Equal Protection Clause and set out the factors courts use to identify a nonjusticiable political question, including textual commitment to another branch and lack of manageable standards.
Rucho v. Common Cause
Held that claims of excessive partisan gerrymandering present political questions beyond federal court competence because no neutral standard exists for how much partisanship is too much, leaving remedies to state courts and Congress.