Patrick Baude is Fuchs Professor of Law at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he has taught constitutional law since 1968. He has also taught at the University of Illinois, the University of Paris, and Warsaw University. His research involves various aspects of federalism, focused on federal courts and state constitutions. He has also been special counsel to the Governor of Indiana and President of the Indiana Board of Law Examiners. He holds a J.D. from the University of Kansas and a Master of Law from Harvard.

Focusing only on those aspects of the topic that are directly tied to the provision of Article III, section 2, of the US Constitution as opposed to legislatively created issues, Baude examines the development of federal jurisdiction in the United States and examines jurisdiction controversies through American history into the present. About half the work is devoted to historical narrative tracing jurisdiction from the Constitutional Convention through the 1988 Supreme Court decision in Webster v. Doe, concerning the right of the courts to review an employee dismissal decision of the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The remainder of the text is devoted to analysis of the constitutional law of federal jurisdiction.