The Anti-Injunction Act and the Problem of Federal-State Jurisdictional Overlap

Ever since Congress decided in 1789 to confer jurisdiction on lower federal courts over matters that the state courts could also hear, the nation has faced the problem of how to allocate decision-making authority between the two court systems. Central to this body of concurrency law, the federal Anti-Injunction Act of 1793 (AIA) was enacted to limit the power of the federal courts to enjoin state court proceedings. Justice Felix Frankfurter decisively shaped our understanding of those limits, concluding in Toucey v. New York Life Insurance Co. that the statute absolutely barred any such injunction. Much of the law of federal-state concurrency has been predicated on Toucey's account.In this Article, we offer a new account of the AIA that challenges prior interpretations. Rather than a flat ban on injunctive relief, we show that the AIA was drafted against the backdrop of eighteenth century practice to restrict "original" federal equitable interference in ongoing state court proceedings but to leave the federal courts free to grant "ancillary" relief in the nature of an injunction to protect federal jurisdiction and to effectuate federal decrees. It was this ancillary power that gave rise to the exceptions that Toucey decried and Congress restored in its 1948 codification.We draw on our new account of the 1793 and 1948 versions of the Act to address current problems of jurisdictional overlap. Among other things, we raise new questions about the much maligned Rooker-Feldman doctrine; offer a new statutory substitute for the judge-made doctrine of equitable restraint; and suggest new ways to harmonize such abstention doctrines as Burford and Colorado River. Curiously, answers to these (and other) puzzles were hiding in the careful decision of the 1793 drafters to restrict only the issuance of "writs of injunction" and otherwise to leave federal equitable power intact.IntroductionSince the adoption of the nation's first judiciary act in 1789, the lower federal courts and the state courts have exercised concurrent jurisdiction over a wide range of matters.1 The map of jurisdictional concurrency includes a host of statutory and doctrinal landmarks, some familiar, some obscure.2 State courts can hear all claims arising under federal law, except where Congress has assigned exclusive jurisdiction to the federal courts;3 they also owe a positive duty of uncertain scope to adjudicate such federal claims.4 Similarly, while federal courts enjoy jurisdiction over claims arising under federal law, they often hear claims governed by state law as well, in the exercise of their diversity or supplemental jurisdiction, and do so under a similar though less exacting duty of legal compulsion.5 Although the defendant(s) can ordinarily remove any case to federal court that the plaintiff(s) could have filed there,6 the law makes no general provision for the transfer of an action from federal to state court.7 In general, the parties can freely pursue claims against each other in both court systems at once; under Kline v. Burke Construction Co.,8 no priority ordinarily attaches to the first filed proceeding.9 Instead, rules of interjurisdictional preclusion oblige the second court (state or federal) to give effect to the first final judgment on the merits.10The Anti-Injunction Act of 179311 (AIA) has played a central role in the development of our complex law of federal--state jurisdictional concurrency, limiting the ability of federal courts to use antisuit injunctions as a tool of coordination in cases of jurisdictional overlap.12 According to the dominant account, the Act was drafted to impose an "absolute ban"13 on or "firm bar" against any federal injunctions to stay proceedings in state court.14 But this absolute ban was undercut, so the story goes, by an activist federal judiciary, which ignored the terms of the Act and recognized a series of exceptions that allowed the issuance of federal injunctive relief in certain circumstances. …