Clarification Needed: Fixing the Jurisdiction and Venue Clarification Act

One hates to seem ungrateful. Judges and scholars frequently call for Congress to fix problems in the law of jurisdiction and procedure, and Congress doesn't usually intervene. In that light, the Jurisdiction and Venue Clarification Act ("JVCA"),[1] signed into law on December 7, 2011, ought to be a welcome improvement. And hopefully, on balance, it will be.

But in at least one area that it attempts to clarify, the JVCA leaves much to be desired. Professor Arthur Hellman has called the JVCA "the most far-reaching package of revisions to the Judicial Code since the Judicial Improvements Act of 1990."[2] The Act addresses a variety of removal issues-including unrelated federal and state claims, multiple defendants, removal of criminal cases, and the amount in controversy-and makes several major changes to the law of venue. This essay addresses one of those removal issues: the amount in controversy in a case removed from state court. I argue that there are at least three respects in which the JVCA failed to adequately clarify the law of diversity removal jurisdiction.