Cite as: 504 U. S. 689 (1992)
Opinion of the Court
respects, see 28 U. S. C. § 1332 note, we presume, absent any indication that Congress intended to alter this exception, see ibid.; Advisory Committee's Note 3 to Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 2, 28 U. S. C. App., p. 555, that Congress "adopt[ed] that interpretation" when it reenacted the diversity statute. Loril-lard v. Pons, 434 U. S. 575, 580 (1978).5
III
In the more than 100 years since this Court laid the seeds for the development of the domestic relations exception, the lower federal courts have applied it in a variety of circumstances. See, e. g., cases cited in n. 1, supra. Many of these applications go well beyond the circumscribed situations posed by Barber and its progeny. Barber itself disclaimed federal jurisdiction over a narrow range of domestic relations issues involving the granting of a divorce and a decree of alimony, see 21 How., at 584, and stated the limits on federal-court power to intervene prior to the rendering of such orders:
"It is, that when a court of competent jurisdiction over the subject-matter and the parties decrees a divorce, and alimony to the wife as its incident, and is unable of itself to enforce the decree summarily upon the husband, that courts of equity will interfere to prevent the decree from being defeated by fraud. The interference, however, is limited to cases in which alimony has been decreed; then only to the extent of what is due, and always to cases in which no appeal is pending from the decree for the divorce or for alimony." Id., at 591.
The Barber Court thus did not intend to strip the federal courts of authority to hear cases arising from the domestic
5 Justice Blackmun criticizes us for resting upon Congress' apparent acceptance of the Court's earlier construction of the diversity statute in the 1948 codification. See post, at 708-709 (opinion concurring in judgment). We see nothing remarkable in this decision. See, e. g., Flood v. Kuhn, 407 U. S. 258, 283-284 (1972).
701
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