Kalir on Artis v. District of Columbia

Doron Kalir has published Artis v. District of Columbia—What Did the Court Actually Say?, 94 Notre Dame L. Rev. Online 81 (2018). It begins:

On January 22, 2018, the Supreme Court issued Artis v. District of Columbia. A true “clash of the titans,” this 5–4 decision featured colorful comments on both sides, claims of “absurdities,” uncited use of Alice in Wonderland vocabulary (“curiouser,” anyone?), and an especially harsh accusation by the dissent that “we’ve wandered so far from the idea of a federal government of limited and enumerated powers that we’ve begun to lose sight of what it looked like in the first place.”

One might assume that the issue in question was a complex constitutional provision, or a dense, technical federal code section. Far from it. The sole issue in Artis was the interpretation of 28 U.S.C. § 1367(d), an obscure tolling provision dealing with the time period allowed for plaintiffs who filed their claims in federal court and were dismissed to refile their claims in state court.