The Anna Nicole Smith case.

One of the perils of lawprof blogging is that when the Supreme Court issues a decision in your field, posting about it seems compulsory. And this one even has a big hulking celebrity who would ordinarily be fun to write about for almost no reason at all. But I don't wanna to write about the Anna Nicole Smith case.

It's a unanimous opinion about a fine point of a doctrine about which I've never made any class read a single case in over 20 years of teaching Federal Jurisdiction. Suffice it to say: The jurisdiction of the federal courts is defined by statutes. Old case law contains a judge-made exception for probate cases. In the face of a statute that contains no exception and old case law making an exception, what are you going to do? Read the exception narrowly.