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Despite its prominence in judicial and academic discussions of federal jurisdiction, the bias-uniformity-expertise model has significant limitations. This is true in two senses. First, there are important ways in which the shape of our jurisdictional landscape cannot be squared with the standard account of the purposes federal question jurisdiction is designed to serve. It is not simply that pockets of the law of federal question jurisdiction are difficult to explain by reference to the narratives of bias, uniformity, or expertise (though that is surely the case); the dissonance is far sharper. Key fragments of the rules governing the federal courts' authority to decide questions of federal law have explicitly been premised on rejection of each component of the conventional model of federal question jurisdiction. Thus, the actual behavior of Congress and the courts in setting the terms of the federal judiciary's interface with federal law raises serious doubts as to the explanatory power of the conventional account. Second--and this, no doubt, explains some of the dissonance between the theory and practice of federal question jurisdiction--there is reason to doubt the accuracy of the empirical claims that lie at the core of the conventional wisdom. That is, there is cause to question whether federal judges are in fact more likely than their state court counterparts to vindicate federal claims, whether the lower federal courts meaningfully advance the interest in a uniform interpretation of federal law, and whether and when the claim of federal judicial expertise has genuine purchase.

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