The Class Action Fairness Act in Perspective: The Old and the New in Federal Jurisdictional Reform
The Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 (CAFA) was the product of an extended and well-organized political campaign.The Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 (CAFA) was the product of an extended and well-organized political campaign. In Congress, its passage required a grinding eight-year effort, several modifications to the original proposal, numerous committee hearings, multiple reports by both Houses, political compromises that drew some Democratic support, two unsuccessful attempts to terminate debate in the Senate by imposing cloture, and strenuous efforts to amend in both the House and Senate when the bill came to the floor for a final vote. Passage also required Republican control of both Houses of Congress and the presidency as well.
The Jurisdiction Canon
This Article concerns the interpretation of jurisdictional statutes. The fundamental postulate of the law of the federal courts is that the federal courts are courts of limited subject‐matter jurisdiction. That principle is reinforced by a canon of statutory interpretation according to which statutes conferring federal subject‐matter jurisdiction are to be construed narrowly, with ambiguities resolved against the availability of federal jurisdiction. This interpretive canon is over a century old and has been recited in thousands of federal cases, but its future has become uncertain. The Supreme Court recently stated that the canon does not apply to many of today’s most important jurisdictional disputes. The Court’s decision is part of a pattern, as several cases from the last decade have questioned the canon’s validity, a surprising development given what appeared to be the canon’s entrenched status.This state of flux and uncertainty provides an ideal time to assess the merits and the likely future trajectory of the canon requiring narrow construction of jurisdictional statutes. This Article undertakes, first, a normative evaluation of the canon and its potential justifications. The normative evaluation requires consideration of several matters, including the canon’s historical pedigree, its relationship to constitutional values and congressional preferences, and its ability to bring about good social outcomes. Reasonable minds can differ regarding whether the canon is ultimately justified, but the case for it turns out to be weaker than most observers would initially suspect. Second, the Article attempts, as a positive matter, to identify the institutional and political factors that have contributed to the canon’s recent negative trajectory and that can be expected to shape its future path. The canon’s future is uncertain because it depends on the interaction of a variety of influences including docket composition, interest‐group activity, and the (potentially shifting) attitude of the Supreme Court toward the civil justice system. This Article’s examination of the jurisdiction canon has broader value beyond the field of federal jurisdiction because it sheds some incidental light on the more general questions of why interpretive rules change, how methodological changes spread through the judicial hierarchy, and how the interpretive practices of the lower courts vary from those of the Supreme Court.
On the Graph Edit Distance Cost: Properties and Applications
We model the edit distance as a function in a labeling space. A labeling space is an Euclidean space where coordinates are the edit costs. Through this model, we define a class of cost. A class of cost is a region in the labeling space that all the edit costs have the same optimal labeling. Moreover, we characterize the distance value through the labeling space. This new point of view of the edit distance gives us the opportunity of defining some interesting properties that are useful for a better understanding of the edit distance. Finally, we show the usefulness of these properties through some applications.