Establishment of the Federal judicial system

else seems little in comparison.” Second, circuit riding exposed the justices to the state laws they would interpret on the Supreme Court and to legal practices around the country— it let them “mingle in the strife of jury trials,” as a defender of circuit riding said in 1864. Third, it contributed to what today we call “nation building.” It would, according to Attorney General Edmund Randolph, “impress the citizens of the United States favorably toward the general government, should the most distinguished judges visit every state.” (In fact, they did more than visit. The justices’ grand jury charges explained the new regime to prominent citizens all over the country, winning praise from the Federalist press and barbs from the Jeffersonian press. Whatever logic supported circuit riding, the justices themselves set about almost immediately to abolish it. They saw themselves as “traveling postboys.” They doubted, in the words of a Senate ally, “that riding rapidly from one end of this country to another is the best way to study law.” Furthermore, they warned President Washington, trial judges who serve also as appellate judges are sometimes required to “correct in one capacity the errors which they themselves may have committed in another . . . a distinction unfriendly to impartial justice.” The 1789 Act prohibited district judges from voting as circuit judges in appeals from their district court decisions but placed no similar prohibition on Supreme Court justices. The justices themselves agreed to recluse themselves from appeals from their own decisions unless there was a split vote (a rare occurrence). Congress’s only response to their complaints was a 1793 statute reducing to one the number `of justices necessary for a circuit court quorum..

Nowdays many things that the First Judiciary Act required have been swept aside. But other features it provided are so intrinsic to US system of justice that the Americans rarely give them a second thought: a separate set of courts for the national government, arranged geographically according to state boundaries, deciding matters of national interest. When the Act was approaching its third year, Chief Justice John Jay, sitting as a judge of the Circuit Court for the Eastern Circuit, undertook in his charge to the grand juries of that circuit to describe something of this new system of federal courts. Those who created the federal courts faced a formidable task, he observed, because “no tribunals of the like kind and extent had heretofore existed in this country.” In that environment of experimentation, Jay reminded the grand jurors— and his words could well be a charter for contemporary efforts— that “the expediency of carrying justice, as it were, to every man’s door, was obvious; but how to do it in an expedient manner was far from being apparent.”