Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/20pdf/19-968_8nj9.pdf
Page Number: 21

Cite as:  592 U. S. ____ (2021) 

5 

ROBERTS, C. J., dissenting 

plaintiff cannot “benefit in a tangible way from the court’s
intervention.”  Steel Co. v. Citizens for Better Environment, 
523  U. S.  83,  103,  n. 5  (1998)  (internal  quotation  marks 
omitted).

We should of course consult founding-era decisions when 
discerning the boundaries of our jurisdiction, for the Fram-
ers sought to limit the judicial power to “Cases” and “Con-
troversies,”  as  those  terms  were  understood  at  the  time. 
See Coleman v. Miller, 307 U. S. 433, 460 (1939) (opinion of 
Frankfurter, J.).  No question.  But that does not mean that 
the requirements of Article III are “satisfied merely because 
a party requests a court of the United States to declare its 
legal rights, and has couched that request for forms of relief 
historically associated with courts of law in terms that have 
a familiar ring to those trained in the legal process.”  Valley 
Forge, 454 U. S., at 471.  A focus on common law analogues
cannot obscure the significance of the establishment of an
independent  Judiciary—a  “remarkable  transformation” 
from  a  system  with  courts  operating  as  “appendages  of 
crown power.”  Gordon S. Wood, The Origins of Judicial Re-
view, 22 Suffolk U. L. Rev. 1293, 1304 (1988).  That trans-
formation carries with it the need to cabin the jurisdiction 
of the Judiciary to ensure it does not trespass on the prov-
ince of the political branches. 

It is in any event entirely unclear whether common law 
courts would have awarded nominal damages in a case like 
the one before us.  There is no dispute that “nominal dam-
ages  historically  could  provide  prospective  relief,”  because 
such awards allowed “plaintiffs at common law to ‘obtain a
form of declaratory relief in a legal system with no general 
declaratory judgment act.’ ”  Ante, at 4 (quoting D. Laycock 
& R. Hasen, Modern American Remedies 636 (5th ed. 2019); 
emphasis added); see Borchard, The Declaratory Judgment—
A Needed Procedural Reform, 28 Yale L. J. 1, 25–29 (1918) 
(describing  the  development  of  declaratory  judgments  in
England  in  the  second  half  of  the  19th  century).    Yet  the