U.S. Circuit Court Timeline — SCOTUS Expansion Study
# of Circuits vs # of States vs # of SCOTUS Justices
Below you will find a table chronicling a numerical timeline of the U.S. Circuit Courts. I have included the total number of states and territories under jurisdiction; the number of circuits, including an identification of which states and territories belong in which circuits; and the number of Supreme Court justices. This table provides an entry any time there is a change in any one or more of these factors.
Article III of the Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate the Court, which includes the Supreme Court as well as the Federal Court system. The Judiciary Act of 1789 established the first Supreme Court, composed of six justices, and divided the nation — consisting of 11 states and two colonies — into three Circuits. See the illustration above the header for a 1789 circuit map.
There was a rational relationship at that time between the number of Justices and the number of Circuits since each circuit would be presided over by two Supreme Court Justices and one district court judge. Eventually this requirement for Justices to serve on the district courts was abandoned for at least a couple of reasons: a) it was burdensome for the Justices to travel back and forth from the Circuits, and b) it occasionally led to the unsupportable circumstance of a Justice having to sit on appeal for a case he had already presided over.
The Seventh Circuit Act of 1807 increased the number of circuits and the number of justices to seven (one for each circuit). In 1837 there were nine of each. In 1863 there were 10. Some drama ensured in 1866 when the late President Lincoln’s Congress thwarted the new President Andrew Johnson — whose Reconstruction plan would have turned back civil rights advances for Southern Blacks — by reducing the number of justices to seven and the number of circuits to nine. Then, in 1869, after Ulysses S. Grant took office, the number of justices was raised back to nine, and it has stayed at nine ever since.
Today the federal courts are divided into 13 circuits covering 50 states plus the District of Columbia, plus the Federal Circuit Courts, plus four territories — Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands. (The territories at one time also included the District of the Canal Zone but that was discontinued in 1982.) The circuit map now looks like this:
This table below was created with the help of the Federal Judicial Center website which includes wonderful color-coded circuit court maps which the user can interact with to see the changes over time. My goal in creating this table was to provide an opportunity to view these changes at a glance, and has been edited to show the growth in the number of States and the number of Circuits as compared to the number of Supreme Court Justices. Alternating colors provides for easier viewing.
I am always happy to accept corrections to my data where needed.
