District of Columbia Court of Appeals V. Feldman - Facts

Facts

The U.S. Congress enacted several pieces of legislation with respect to Washington, D.C.'s local judicial system. One required final judgments from the District of Columbia Court of Appeals to be treated like final judgments from the high court of any state; another permitted that Court of Appeals to create rules governing the qualifications and admissions of attorneys to practice in the D.C. courts. The Court of Appeals then passed rules requiring applicants to the D.C. bar to have graduated from an ABA-accredited law school.

The plaintiffs - Feldman and Hickey - were practicing attorneys from other states, but neither had graduated from ABA-accredited law schools. Feldman had been admitted to the Virginia bar through an apprenticeship, and had been admitted to the Maryland bar through a waiver of their requirements, based on his personal experience. Feldman was denied admission by the Committee on Admissions of the District of Columbia Bar, so he sought a similar waiver of the D.C. rule, sending a letter to the D.C. Court of Appeals that suggested that their absolute prohibition of lawyers who had not attended certain schools was a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, and of the Fourteenth Amendment. Nevertheless, the D.C. Courts issued an opinion confirming that they would not waive their requirement. Hickey had a similar background, but did not suggest that the D.C. Court of Appeals was in violation of any laws.

The plaintiff then filed an action in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which denied jurisdiction based on Rooker's prohibition against federal courts hearing appeals of state court judgments. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia reversed, saying that this was not the kind of judicial determination that a federal court would be barred from hearing on appeal from a decision of a state court.