The American JudiciaryBaldwin, Simeon E. (Simeon Eben)
History
The American Judiciary
Baldwin, Simeon E. (Simeon Eben)
Courts -- United States; Law -- United States -- History
In Connecticut, appellate jurisdiction was originally retained by
the General Assembly, but when the docket became too crowded,
resort was occasionally had to the appointment of a special and
temporary commission of appeals to clear it off. As early as
1719, one was constituted for this purpose to hold office for two
years.
No colony set up a permanent supreme court with full appellate
jurisdiction. None probably cared to do this, and none probably
thought that it could. The Lords of Trade and Plantations would
have rightly thought such a step hardly consistent with the
maintenance of their revisory and controlling powers. It would
have been too costly to allow two appeals; and for them to
reverse a judgment of a colonial supreme court would have been
more distasteful to Americans than the exercise of a similar
power as to a court professedly of superior, not supreme,
jurisdiction.
New York had a court named Supreme, but its business was largely
the trial of original causes, and the Governor and Council
claimed the right of reviewing its judgments. The judges in 1765
denied the existence of such a right, but the King in Council
decided against them.[Footnote: Hunt, "Life of Edward
Livingston," 26.]
As soon as regular judges, not members of other departments of
the government, were appointed for the highest court, they were
generally required to perform circuit duty in the various
counties during part of each year.[Footnote: See
"Am. Hist. Review," III, 44.] This was a leading feature of the
judicial establishment set up in 1686 under Sir Edmund Andros for
the "Dominion of New England."[Footnote: Col. Rec. of Conn., III,
402, 411.]
South Carolina, for a hundred years, centered all her judicial
business at Charleston. No courts sat anywhere else and all the
lawyers in the State resided in the city. In the latter part of
the eighteenth century she followed the other colonies in
establishing a circuit system and county courts.[Footnote: Morse,
"American Universal Geography," ed. 1796, 690; Osgood, "The
American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century," II, 279, 300.]
There was occasionally some little approach to English form when
the colonial judges went on the circuit. In Massachusetts the
sheriff or his deputy was accustomed to come out from the court
town to meet the judges as they approached it, to open a term of
court.[Footnote: "Life and Works of John Adams," II, 280. See
Chap. XIII.]
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