## Facts

- Federal statutes governed allotment and distribution of Cherokee Nation lands and funds, including a 1902 act and later 1904 and 1906 acts that altered eligibility and affected claimed allottee interests.
- Certain Cherokee allottees (including David Muskrat and J. Henry Dick) asserted the later statutes unconstitutionally impaired property interests they believed were secured under the 1902 act.
- Congress enacted the Act of March 1, 1907, authorizing designated allottees to sue the United States in the Court of Claims “to test the validity” of the 1904 and 1906 statutes.
- The 1907 act provided that litigation expenses, including attorney fees for both sides, would be paid from the Treasury.
- The allottees filed suit in the Court of Claims challenging the constitutionality of the later allotment legislation; the Court of Claims sustained the statutes and dismissed the petitions.
- The allottees appealed to the Supreme Court under the review path contemplated by the 1907 act.

## Issues

1. Whether a suit authorized by Congress solely to obtain a judicial determination of the constitutionality of earlier federal statutes presents a justiciable Article III “case or controversy.”
2. Whether Congress may confer jurisdiction on federal courts to decide such a dispute where the named parties are not genuinely adverse.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court dismissed the suits for want of jurisdiction.
- The Court held that the proceeding did not present an Article III case or controversy because it lacked genuine adversity between parties with opposing legal interests.
- The Court concluded Congress could not require federal courts to decide the constitutionality of legislation through a statutorily manufactured test case.
- The Court treated the jurisdiction-conferring portion of the 1907 act as unconstitutional insofar as it attempted to expand the judicial power beyond cases and controversies.

## Legal Principles

- Article III limits federal judicial power to actual “cases” and “controversies” involving genuinely adverse parties.
- Federal courts may not issue advisory opinions or exercise a generalized power to pass on the validity of congressional enactments outside a concrete dispute.
- Congress may regulate federal court jurisdiction within constitutional bounds, but it cannot expand the scope of the “judicial power” by authorizing litigation whose primary object is abstract constitutional review.
- A proceeding lacking genuine adversity and concrete stakes is nonjusticiable, and any resulting judgment would not function as binding resolution of rights in later disputes.

## Conclusion

The Court held that a congressionally authorized suit designed to test the constitutionality of federal statutes, without a real dispute between adverse parties, is not a justiciable case or controversy under Article III; accordingly, the Court lacked jurisdiction and dismissed.


Muskrat v. United States, 219 U.S. 346 (1911)