Justices Clarify Limits on District Court Review Doctrine (1)

A divided US Supreme Court blocked a Maryland individual’s federal lawsuit against a hospital system as it clarified a legal doctrine that says federal district courts lack authority to review lawsuits seeking to invalidate judgments by state courts.

That standard extends to litigants whose case is still pending appeals in the state courts’ system and has yet to receive a final judgment, the court said in a 5-4 ruling, authored by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, issued Thursday.

The ruling came in a dispute over the Rooker-Feldman doctrine, an obscure legal standard that’s intended to prevent losers of state court judgments from ...