Over the Supreme Court's past four Terms, federal postconviction habeas corpus has been placed on the chopping-block. Its fate hangs in the balance of an historical debate over the maxim, oft recited by the Court between 1830-1953, that postconviction habeas reaches only "jurisdictional defects" — as opposed to “mere error” — on the part of the convicting court. Justices Gorsuch and Thomas maintain that “jurisdiction” carried then the same narrow meaning it does now: power ab initio over the offense charged and the defendant’s person. Justices Kagan and Jackson contend that, in this context, “jurisdictional defect” was understood broadly enough to encompass any error of federal constitutional (or perhaps even statutory) law. Functionally, Gorsuch and Thomas are arguing to altogether abolish federal postconviction review of even the most serious alleged constitutional violations, while Kagan and Jackson are arguing to perpetuate a status quo that a broad, cross-ideological scholarly consensus recognizes as deeply broken.

Fortunately, the historical record makes abundantly clear that neither the Gorsuch-Thomas position nor the Kagan-Jackson position can be right. In many pre-1953 cases, the Court did deem alleged constitutional violations to be “jurisdictional,” but in just as many other such cases, it refused to make that move. Not as fortunately, the Court has struggled for 195 years to articulate a clear answer to the question of which constitutional violations implicate “jurisdiction” for habeas purposes, and which do not. Likewise, of the countless brilliant scholars who have scoured the historical caselaw for such an answer, none has found one. As Paul Bator famously put it in 1963, “[o]nce the concept of ‘jurisdiction’ is taken beyond the question of the [convicting] court’s competence to deal with the class of offenses charged and the person of the prisoner, it becomes a less than luminous beacon.” 

This Article seeks, in the historical concept of “jurisdiction,” what had eluded Bator and so many others: a more luminous beacon. What is different this time, however, is our understanding of the writ’s hardwired conceptual DNA. As I have recently argued, American habeas principally operates not on a logic of individual physical liberty (as long conventionally assumed), but on one of regulating the principal-agent relationship between We the People and the governmental officials who wield our delegated penal power. When we approach the historical caselaw from this novel conceptual premise, it finally does yield a luminous beacon for modern habeas jurisprudence to follow: state actors’ willful disobedience or systemic disregard of the People’s constitutional commands are indeed “jurisdictional defects” cognizable on postconviction habeas review; their good-faith mistakes on federal constitutional questions, however, are not.