Which state-law cases should Congress allow into federal court? Congress’s answer has always been “only the big ones.” This article revisits the choice to limit diversity jurisdiction to higher-value cases and critically examines how Congress has approached setting the amount threshold. It surveys alternate ways Congress could use case value to sort which cases make it into the diversity docket. We explore lotteries, auctioning access to the highest bidder, setting an amount in controversy maximum rather than the current minimum, pegging the jurisdictional amount to the minimum wage or the cost of a hamburger, employing relative measures that use multiples (or fractions) of a litigant’s income, and other devious proposals.
Some of these proposals are too radical to ever happen. Others, like changing which damages count toward the limit, are mainstream enough to have been endorsed by the federal judiciary. Our goal is to jolt. Few items in Congress’s jurisdictional toolkit are so consequential yet so taken for granted, so little examined, or so poorly understood. By reimagining the amount-in-controversy requirement, we aim to ignite renewed attention and appreciation to its impact on the diversity docket. More broadly, we offer this article as a new entry point to revisit the conceptual and doctrinal underpinnings of the federal diversity docket, and access to federal court generally.
To read this Article, please click here: Altered Stakes: Reimagining the Amount-in-Controversy Requirement.
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