Date & time
Venue
Courtroom 3, Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory, Knowles Place, Canberra City
Register for the event
Event description
The US Supreme Court is famously the top US appellate court, but the US Constitution also makes the Court a trial court, giving it original jurisdiction over, among other things, suits by states against other states. This jurisdiction remains exclusive to the Court, making it the sole forum for interstate disputes. Yet the Court uses a variety of prudential doctrines to avoid these cases. While there are good structural and pragmatic reasons for these doctrines, their use is almost certainly unconstitutional. Worse, those doctrines systematically discriminate against plaintiff states in certain types of interstate disputes, depriving those states of a forum and hindering political resolution of these conflicts.
In this free public lecture, Professor Heather Elliott from the University of Alabama will explain the often perverse aspects of the Court's approach to these cases, the problems that flow from that approach, and potential solutions.
Professor Elliott is in Australia as a Visitor at the Centre for International and Public Law (CIPL) at the ANU College of Law, Governance and Policy. This lecture has been arranged with the assistance of CIPL.
Speakers
Professor Heather Elliott
Heather Elliott currently teaches Civil Procedure, Land Use Law, and Water Law. She also regularly teaches Introduction to the Study of Law and Legislation & Regulation.
Professor Elliott is a former law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and to Judge Merrick B. Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. From 2003-2005, she was an appellate litigation associate at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr LLP in Washington, DC, where she wrote briefs to the United States Supreme Court, the California Supreme Court, and numerous federal and state intermediate appellate courts in cases involving constitutional law, bankruptcy, Indian law, administrative law, and environmental law.
Professor Elliott’s scholarship has two focuses: the role of courts and agencies in a democratic society, and Alabama water law & policy. She studied the latter from 2014 to 2016 under a grant from the United States Geological Survey, and a book arising from the study is forthcoming from the University of Alabama Press.