To reduce inflation, the Federal Reserve (Fed) raises interest rates. But every month with high interest rates increases the risk of a devastating recession. Recessions impose not only short-term pain in the form of widespread unemployment but also lifelong harm for many, as vulnerable workers and those who start their careers during a downturn never fully recover. Yet hiking interest rates is the centerpiece of U.S. inflation-fighting policy. When inflation is high, the Fed raises interest rates until inflation is tamed, regardless of the consequent sacrifices. We call this inflation-fighting paradigm “monetary primacy.” Despite its great risks, monetary primacy has remained unchallenged by either political party and largely ignored by legal scholars.

This Article exposes monetary primacy’s incoherence and proposes an alternative framework that relegates interest rate hikes to a supporting role in the fight against inflation. Governments possess other policy tools for controlling inflation that are better situated to lead. Examples include supply-side reforms to sectors facing bottlenecks, tighter fiscal policy, and more vigilant antitrust and consumer law enforcement. Between 2021 and 2023, the United States deployed many of these tools, albeit not necessarily motivated by inflation concerns. And while the Fed has received much attention for lowering inflation during this period, it likely had limited impact. Thus, our framework has descriptive power for the astonishing recent success in moderating excess inflation without causing a recession. That reality has, however, been missed—increasing the chances that the Fed keeps rates too high as the economy slows.

Instead of monetary primacy, the Fed should set interest rates at a level that is best for long-term employment and price stability, known as the “natural” rate of interest. If inflation remains too high when interest rates equal the natural rate, then the Fed, the Executive Branch, and Congress should compare the sacrifice associated with raising interest rates above their natural rate to the alternative policy tools and choose the least costly option. We assert that, in many but not all cases, the preferred option will not be elevated interest rates, and we propose reforms to enable other institutions to respond effectively to inflation alongside the Fed. This proposal would shift U.S. policy from monetary primacy to macroeconomic pluralism, which means leveraging an array of economically beneficial (or at least less harmful) tools. In both the short term and the long term, moving away from monetary primacy will help increase the chances of conquering inflation, avoiding a recession, and expanding economic opportunity.

Across a range of cases, fossil fuel companies, government actors, and some judges have conceded that climate change is an exceptional phenomenon, only to argue that its exceptional nature is a reason to keep climate change out of court. These parties and judges thus seek to avoid the adjudication of climate cases on the merits, even when the neutral application of existing law would provide for jurisdiction in these cases. We term this phenomenon “climate jurisdiction exceptionalism.”

This Article provides a comprehensive account of climate jurisdiction exceptionalism, focusing on two main threads: Article III standing and state court jurisdiction. First, parties (and some courts) make various arguments about why federal courts should deny standing to plaintiffs in cases related to climate change. These arguments tend to track three themes: that climate change is too general, too uncertain, and too political an issue to support jurisdiction. Second, defendants offer a range of novel and boundary-pushing arguments about federal jurisdiction to oust state courts of jurisdiction over climate cases with the ultimate goal of getting federal courts to dismiss.

This Article then offers the normative case against climate jurisdiction exceptionalism as practiced in the United States as well as in some foreign courts. We show that arguments for climate jurisdiction exceptionalism run counter to settled notions of access to justice, federalism, and the separation of powers—and they do so without providing any justification for such exceptional treatment. We further show that exceptional doctrine cannot be limited to any small, discernible category of cases but instead is likely to spill over into the law of jurisdiction more broadly. We also suggest that a particularly pernicious version of climate jurisdiction exceptionalism exists when judges and parties deny that they are being exceptional. This hidden exceptionalism has the same problems as more public exceptionalism while also undermining accountability and risking further harm to the rule of law.

Every litigant deserves their day in court. At the same time, litigants cannot endlessly go to court on the same matter. A complex body of preclusion law balances these fundamental tenets by examining when adjudication of a matter precludes subsequent relitigation. This body of law has evolved over time to preserve the day-in-court ideal in a way that is sensitive to the threats that relitigation present to judicial efficiency, fair adjudication, and repose. Modern preclusion law has settled on a pragmatic approach: where a court has issued a final judgment on the merits but erroneously assumed jurisdiction, relitigation may still be fruitless and justly precluded. However, this pragmatic approach, and the rich body of scholarship accompanying it, vanishes in cases where the rendering court declares that it lacks jurisdiction and does not attempt to decide the case on the merits. Courts confronted with the preclusive effect of such jurisdictional dismissals default to the longstanding view that such dismissals carry no preclusive effect on relitigation on the merits. This Note challenges this bright-line rule by arguing that where a jurisdictional dismissal is predicated on a determination that is intertwined with the merits, the values underlying preclusion should take priority.