Supreme Court Justice Byron White said in 1984, “Each of the courts of appeals . . . is for all practical purposes the final expositor of the federal law within its geographical jurisdiction.” More recently, a law professor wrote, “In large measure, it is the circuit courts that create U.S. law. They represent the true iceberg, of which the Supreme Court is but the most visible tip. The circuit courts play by far the greatest legal policymaking role in the United States judicial system.”
When Congress established them in 1891, the U.S. circuit courts of appeals (as they were known then) did not occupy such a lofty position in the federal judiciary. Created as a level of intermediate courts, their job consisted almost entirely of correcting errors made by the trial courts to relieve caseload pressure on the Supreme Court of the United States. Since that time, however, the U.S. courts of appeals have undergone significant change. As caseloads continued to rise during the early twentieth century, the Supreme Court lobbied for and was granted more discretion over its docket. A growing number of federal appeals became final in the courts of appeals unless the Supreme Court elected to hear them. With the courts of appeals as the last point of appellate review for the vast majority of federal cases, they expanded upon their initial—but still crucial—function of error correction and became instrumental in expounding the law as well.
The evolution of the courts of appeals and the increasing importance of their role are important themes permeating the broad historical overview of the courts provided here. This feature is divided into ten sections: 1) The Creation of the U.S. Courts of Appeals; 2) The Judges’ Bill of 1925; 3) Changing Dockets; 4) Differences Between Circuits; 5) Law of the Circuit; 6) En Banc Review; 7) Circuit Splits; 8) Implementation of Remedies; 9) Cases; and 10) Judges.
This feature is intended to expand upon the following existing resources from the FJC’s History of the Federal Judiciary website:
An overview page provides a brief history of the courts of appeals and links to more specific information about the appellate court in each judicial circuit. A page on the Evarts Act of 1891 summarizes the statute that created the courts of appeals and gives the full text of the law. An essay on the appellate jurisdiction of the federal courts details the kinds of cases the appellate courts have heard throughout their history. Finally, Volume II of Debates on the Federal Judiciary: A Documentary History covers legislative debates concerning the establishment of the courts of appeals.
