Academic

Hannon on Donovan v. City of Dallas

By Lawrence Solum

Kendall W. Hannon (Notre Dame Law School) has posted Judicial Federalism and the Anti-Suit Injunction: Using the Constitution to Correct the Supreme Court's Error in Donovan v. City of Dallas on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

Anti-suit injunctions involve a court enjoining an individual from instituting or prosecuting a suit in another court. This power has traditionally been exercised to further equitable principles. In the American system, this power implicates many dif-ferent considerations: state-to-state relations, federal-state relations, and interna-tional relations. The application of anti-suit injunctions in most of these realms have been extensively established either by case law, or, with regards to the federal courts' ability to issue these injunctions against state proceedings, by statute. The Supreme Court in Donovan v. City of Dallas foreclosed the ability of state courts to issue anti-suit injunctions against federal court proceedings. While some scholars have questioned the reasoning employed by the Court in its brief opinion, these cri-tiques have been short and under theorized. No attempt has been made to bring fun-damental principles of federalism to bear on the question. This paper undertakes this task and ultimately arrives at the conclusion that the Constitution requires a recon-sideration of Donovan. Without an explicit congressional action under Article III, state courts possess the power to issue anti-suit injunctions that serve to stay federal court proceedings.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on August 28, 2008 (boomark / email).