Washington signs the Judiciary Act; the Supreme Court gets a chief justice and five associates
The Constitution had promised one Supreme Court but left everything else to Congress: how many judges, what lower courts, what powers. On September 24, 1789, George Washington signed the Judiciary Act, fixing the Court at a chief justice and five associates and building thirteen judicial districts beneath it, each with its own district court. The act also created circuit courts, the Office of Attorney General, and U.S. marshals and attorneys for every district. Immediately after signing, Washington sent the Senate his first slate of nominees to fill the six seats.
The Judiciary Act answered a fight the Constitution had left open: Anti-Federalists feared a national judiciary would swallow state courts. Washington's signature settled it in favor of federal power, and one clause, the right to remove suits into federal court, was called by legal historian Edward A. Purcell Jr. "the most significant innovation" in the Act, asserting national judicial supremacy that still structures American litigation today.
QHow many times has Congress changed the size of the Supreme Court since 1789?
Congress has adjusted the Court's membership at least six times. An 1801 law would have shrunk it to five justices at the next vacancy, but an 1802 law canceled that before it happened, holding the bench at six. Congress then expanded it to seven in 1807, nine in 1837, and ten in 1863. An 1866 law aimed to cut the Court back to seven through attrition, and two of three needed vacancies actually occurred before the Judiciary Act of 1869 stepped in and fixed the number at nine, where it has stood ever since. The 1789 baseline of six justices lasted less than two decades before Congress started tinkering with it.
QWhat dollar amount did Congress set as the threshold for a circuit court to hear a civil case?
The 1789 act drew a hard line at $500. Circuit courts could only take original jurisdiction over civil disputes involving diversity of citizenship, or suits where the United States was the plaintiff, if the amount in controversy hit that figure. District courts, by contrast, handled the smaller stuff: suits brought by the United States needed only $100 to qualify, alongside admiralty cases and petty crimes. The gap between $100 and $500 effectively sorted which federal court a dispute landed in, a bureaucratic threshold with no equivalent in the Constitution, which said nothing about dollar amounts.
QHow long did the Court of Appeals in Cases of Capture operate before the Constitution created a permanent judiciary?
Before the Constitution existed, the Continental Congress had already run a national court under the Articles of Confederation. The Court of Appeals in Cases of Capture, established to handle disputes over captured enemy ships, was the first United States court ever created, established years before the Constitutional Convention, predating the Judiciary Act. Congress under the Articles also stood up tribunals to referee state-versus-state border fights, including Connecticut against Pennsylvania and New York against Massachusetts, plus a court for the Northwest Territory. Washington's 1789 act did not invent federal courts from nothing. It replaced an older, patchwork system that Article IX of the Articles of Confederation had authorized years before the Constitutional Convention ever met.
