Cite as: 504 U. S. 689 (1992)
Blackmun, J., concurring in judgment
prior precedent explicitly exempting professional baseball from antitrust laws where Congress "by its positive inaction" has allowed prior decisions to stand).
Even assuming the Court today correctly interprets Barber, its extension of any domestic relations "exception" to the diversity statute for child custody matters is not warranted by any known principles of statutory construction. The Court relies on In re Burrus, 136 U. S. 586 (1890), in which the Court denied the "jurisdiction" of a Federal District Court to issue a writ of habeas corpus in favor of a father to recover the care and custody of his child from the child's grandfather. That case did not involve the diversity statute, but rather the habeas corpus statute, and the Court expressly declined to address the diversity statute.7 Id., at 597. To the Court today this is just a "technica[l]" distinction. Ante, at 703. I find it germane, because, to the best of my knowledge, a court is not at liberty to craft exceptions to statutes that are not at issue in a case.
II
A
To reject the Court's construction of the diversity statute is not, however, necessarily to reject the federal courts' long-7 If, in Barber, the Court might have been said plausibly to have relied on limitations of the English chancery courts with respect to divorce and alimony, it seems highly unlikely that the Court in Burrus might have relied on a similar justification for child custody matters. The Court in Burrus attached as an appendix to its opinion, 136 U. S., at 597, a "very instructive" and "a very careful and a very able opinion," In the Matter of Barry, from the Circuit Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York. See In re Burrus, 136 U. S., at 594. That opinion stated that child custody matters "res[t] solely in England on the common law" and that such determinations "devolved upon the high courts of equity and law." Id., at 609. See also Lehman v. Lycoming County Children's Services Agency, 458 U. S. 502, 524 (1982) (dissenting opinion) ("Historically, the English common-law courts permitted parents to use the habeas writ to obtain custody of a child as a way of vindicating their own rights").
713
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