Liberty and Order

Repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801

G&S Typesetters PDF proof On 27 February 1801, after the resolution of the electoral tie between Jefferson and Burr, the lame-duck Sixth Congress passed a new Judiciary Act. Federalists had long insisted that the old act of 1789 was inadequate to the nation’s needs, leaving the United States with too few circuit courts and requiring Supreme Court justices to ride circuit. The new law created sixteen circuit courts, increased the number of federal marshals, clerks, and attorneys, and reduced the Supreme Court from six Justices to five. Jefferson was convinced that the act of 1801 was a Federalist ploy to pack the courts with partisans of the defeated party, and, indeed, it was said that John Adams was signing commissions for the new positions until midnight on inauguration day. Repeal of the act was a leading recommendation of Jefferson’s First Annual Message. In the course of the congressional debates, members of both parties also reviewed the struggle of the past ten years. Congressional Proceedings The Senate Friday, 8 January 1802 Agreeably to the order of the day, the Senate proceeded to the consideration of the motion made on the 6th instant, to wit: That the act of Congress passed on the 13th day of February, 1801, entitled “An act to provide for the more convenient organization of the Courts of the United States,” ought to be repealed. Mr. Breckinridge then rose and addressed the President, as follows: It will be expected of me, I presume, sir, as I introduced the resolution now under consideration, to assign my reasons for wishing a repeal of this law. This I shall do; and shall endeavor to show, 1. That the law is unnecessary and improper, and was so at its passage; and 2. That the courts and judges created by it can and ought to be abolished. 1st. That the act under consideration was unnecessary and improper is, to my mind, no difficult task to prove. No increase of courts or judges could be necessary or justifiable unless the existing courts and judges were incompetent to the prompt and proper discharge of the duties consigned to them. To hold out a show of litigation, when in fact little exists, must be impolitic; and to multiply expensive systems and create hosts of expensive officers, without having experienced an actual necessity for them, must be a wanton waste of the public treasure. The [executive] document before us shows that, at the passage of this act, the existing courts, not only from their number, but from the suits depending before them, were fully competent to a speedy decision of those suits. It shows that on the 15th day of June last, there were depending in all the circuit courts (that of Maryland only excepted , whose docket we have not been furnished with) one thousand five hundred and thirty-nine suits. It shows that eight thousand two hundred and seventy-six suits of every description have come before those courts in ten years and upwards. From this it appears that the annual average amount of suits has been about eight hundred. But sundry contingent things have conspired to swell the circuit court dockets. In Maryland, Virginia, and in all the Southern and Southwestern States, a great number of suits have been brought by British creditors; this species of controversy is nearly at an end. In Pennsylvania, the docket has been swelled by prosecutions in consequence of the Western insurrection, by the disturbances in Bucks and Northampton Counties; and by the Sedition Act. These I find amount in that state to two hundred and forty suits. . . . In most of the states there have been prosecutions under the Sedition Act. This source of litigation is, I trust, forever dried up. And, lastly, in all the states a number of suits have arisen under the excise law; which source of controversy will, I hope, before this session terminates, be also dried up. But this same document discloses another important fact; which is, that notwithstanding all these untoward and temporary sources of federal adjudication, the suits in those courts are decreasing; for, from the dockets exhibited Repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801 277 Repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801 20-L2720 9/19/03 7:20 AM Page 277 G&S Typesetters PDF proof (except Kentucky and Tennessee, whose suits are summed up in the aggregate) it appears that in 1799 there were one thousand two hundred and seventy-four and in 1800 there were six hundred and eighty...