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The Complexity And National Significance Of The D.c

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ral circuit court of appeal.
The complexity and national significance of the D.C. Circuit’s docket is, at least in part, due to Congress’s various and diverse grants of subject-matter jurisdiction. Fraser et al. combed the United States Code to discover that 150 statutes contain the words “D.C. Circuit,” and at least 130 of these statutes are grants of jurisdiction. This latter figure includes “at least 43” grants of exclusive jurisdiction to the D.C. Circuit in eight titles.
Regarding the type of agency action the D.C. Circuit is granted jurisdiction to review, grants of jurisdiction are equally diverse. Congress has specifically granted the D.C. Circuit jurisdiction to review “two licensing provisions, thirty-five provisions of fines or penalties, twenty-four rulemaking provisions, and twenty-six other adjudications.”
B. The D.C. Circuit’s Importance to Administrative Law
Because the federal government’s myriad agencies are headquartered in Washington, D.C., the rules of personal jurisdiction render the D.C. Circuit a forum for many anti-fraud suits against government contractors. For instance, under the False Claims Acct (FCA), a suit may be filed in any United States judicial district in which at least one of the named defendants to the suit “can be found, resides, transacts business,” or has made false claims to the government as proscribed in the FCA. Any corporate defendant headquartered Washington, D.C. is therefore within the personal jurisdiction of

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