Louisville & Nashville Railroad Company v. Mottley, 211 U.S. 149 (1908), was a United States Supreme Court decision that held that under the existing statutory scheme, federal question jurisdiction could not be predicated on a plaintiff's anticipation that the defendant would raise a federal statute as a defense.

Instead, such jurisdiction can only arise from a complaint by the plaintiff that the defendant has directly violated some provision of the Constitution, laws, or treaties of the United States.

The Mottleys, Erasmus and Annie, were a husband and wife who had been injured in a train wreck on September 7, 1871, in Jefferson County, Kentucky.

There was no diversity of citizenship, and no grounds for federal question jurisdiction where the Mottleys only sought to have their contracts enforced.

It is important to note that this holding was an interpretation of jurisdictional statutes rather than of the Constitution's Article III.