17891776 Club
John Jay takes the oath as the nation's first Chief Justice
A New York judge, not Washington himself, administers the oath that opens the federal bench.
New York City was still serving as the nation's temporary capital when John Jay stood before Richard Morris, Chief Justice of the New York Supreme Court, on October 19, 1789. Morris administered the oath that made Jay the first Chief Justice of the United States, binding him to "administer justice impartially" under the Constitution and laws Congress had just finished writing into the Judiciary Act of 1789. Jay, who had helped write The Federalist Papers and pushed hard for New York's ratification of the Constitution a year earlier, now led a court that did not yet have a building, a docket, or much of a body of law to interpret…
