94 of questions. Was the full extent of jurisdiction granted in clause one mandatory or could Congress limit the jurisdiction of the federal courts within the guidelines contained in this clause? When a state was mentioned as a party, did it mean that the state could be a defendant as well as a plaintiff? When a case was brought into federal court under its diversity jurisdiction and the issue concerned matters ordinarily dealt with by state courts and state law, what law should the federal court apply? Was the enumeration of cases that would be within the Supreme Court’s original jurisdiction meant to be the sum total of that jurisdiction or was it only a minimumthat Congress could expand upon? These questions had no easy answers, and the solutions to themwere achieved politically. The first Congress decided that it could regulate the jurisdiction of all federal courts, and in the Judiciary Act of 1789 Congress established with great particularity a limited jurisdiction for the district and circuit courts, gave the Supreme Court the original jurisdiction provided for in the Constitution, and granted that Court appellate jurisdiction in cases fromthe federal circuit courts and from state courts where those courts’ rulings had rejected federal claims. The decision to grant federal courts a jurisdiction more restrictive than that allowed by the Constitution represented a recognition by the Congress that the people of the United States would not find a full-blown federal court system palatable at that time. In 1801, a later Congress passed legislation that expanded the jurisdiction of the federal courts to the full extent provided for by the Constitution, but that expansion was repealed by the following Congress in 1802. The justices of the Supreme Court, during the early years of that Court’s existence, apparently believed that Congress had the power to control the jurisdiction of the federal courts and acquiesced in whatever regulations Congress made. In 1799, Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth, who had been both a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and a principal drafter of the Judiciary Act of 1789, ruled that federal courts were without jurisdiction in the case before him, remarking that a federal court was a court “of limited jurisdiction and has cognizance, not of cases generally, but only of a few specially circumstanced.” In the same case. Turner v. Bank ofNorth America (4 Dallas 8 [1799]), Associate Justice Samuel Chase made the point even clearer: “The notion has frequently been entertained that the federal courts derive their judicial power immediately from the constitution; but the political truth is, that the disposal of the judicial power (except in a fewspecified instances) belongs to Congress. If Congress has given the power to this court, we possess it, not otherwise; and if Congress has not given the power to us or to any other court, it still remains at the legislative disposal. Besides, Congress is not bound — to enlarge the jurisdiction of the federal courts, to every subject, in every form, which the constitution might warrant.” In fact. Congress did not again broadly expand the jurisdiction of the federal
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