Federal Courts: A Contemporary Approach

This title utilizes the CasebookPlus™ platform. Learn more at Faculty-CasebookPlus.com.

The Seventh Edition retains the existing structure and interactive features of the casebook. The interactive format provides some distinct advantages, including allowing authors to insert notes and questions within the text of opinions. This has enabled the authors to call attention to passages in the opinions that might otherwise pass by too quickly. These intra-case materials will help students read the cases differently, and should help them understand the cases on a deeper level when they prepare for class, which in turn will allow more in-depth class discussion.

The eBook version of the casebook provides additional flexibility, largely because of hyperlinks to other materials in the text or to online materials that students may want to consult, such as cited cases, secondary sources and some specially prepared materials that will help to amplify the text, e.g., the complaints in American Well Works v. Layne & Bowler and E. Edelmann Co. v. Triple-A Specialty Co. in Chapter 3.

Several chapters have been revised to improve teachability. Chapter 1 continues to draw attention to two key dichotomies, one between constitutional and prudential standing and the other between challenges to legislation and state action on the one hand and judicial review of federal agency action on the other. The standing discussion has been reorganized, bringing the material on generalized grievances earlier in the chapter to accompany the discussion of injury-in-fact. The chapter now includes Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine because its thorough explication of constitutional standing makes it a one-stop-shop for students and instructors alike. To accommodate this addition, Hollingsworth v. Perry and United States v. Windsor have been removed from the main text, though both cases and their associated notes remain available in the Teacher’s Manual for instructors who wish to continue using them.

Chapters 2, 3, and 4—covering Congressional Control of Federal Jurisdiction, Federal-Question Jurisdiction, and Non-Article III Courts—remain largely unchanged, aside from a few cases worth mention in notes.

Chapter 5 is substantially different from its predecessor. On the substantive side, there is the Court’s announcement of a breathtakingly broad presidential immunity that the majority made no serious effort to link to any constitutional text. With respect to recognizing private rights of action to enforce constitutional rights, the Court turned its back on the practice, leaving enforceability of the Bill of Rights in the hands of the (other) political branches. Egbert v. Boulé overruled Bivens sub silentio.

In addition, the materials on official immunity have been moved from Chapter 6, where they were an increasingly uncomfortable fit as the Court expanded federal immunities, to Chapter 5. Other than the limited federal legislators' immunity that the Constitution mandates, all of them have always been federal common law. They were in Chapter 6 because when this text began, the bulk of them related to actions under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, but that is no longer true.

Chapter 8 continues to house the material on abstention doctrines, although those doctrines, like the Court’s immunity doctrines, are all federal common law. Conceptually, they could fit in Chapter 5 as well. But the abstention doctrines stand apart from the rest of the common-law materials because they all are affirmative judicial refusals to exercise jurisdiction that Congress has conferred. One might analogize them to the executive-line-item veto that the Court found unconstitutional in 1998.

The remaining chapters include notes on new developments, most of them incremental, with the possible exception of Edwards v. Vannoy, in which the Court declared that Teague v. Lane’s “watershed exception” described the null set and banished it, and Shinn v. Ramirez, which makes it nearly impossible for habeas petitioners with defaulted but excused trial-ineffectiveness claims to succeed on the merits.

This edition utilizes the CasebookPlus™ platform. Anchored by faculty-authored self-assessments, CasebookPlus allows students to test their understanding of core concepts as they are learning them in class with quizzes keyed to each chapter, subject area review quizzes, and helpful explanations. Learn more at Faculty-CasebookPlus.com.

Imprint: West Academic Publishing
Series: Interactive Casebook Series
Publication Date: 01/01/2026