Each state (except for Alaska, Arizona, Hawaii, and New Mexico, which became states after the circuit courts were abolished) and the District of Columbia has a landing page within the U.S. Circuit Courts (1789-1911) section of the website. The landing pages have links to four types of content: Circuit Justices and Judges, Legislative History, Meeting Places, and Records and Bibliography. A brief guide to these categories of information follows, after which two additional subsections of the U.S. Circuit Courts section are described.

Justices and Judges:

These pages contain lists of all Supreme Court justices and U.S. circuit judges who served on the circuit courts of the state. Justices sat on these courts when riding their allotted circuit. Circuit judges, whose positions were first created in 1869 (see U.S. Circuit Judges, 1869-1911, below, for more information), served on the circuit courts for each judicial district within their assigned circuit.

Legislative History:

The legislative history pages contain dates, citations, and brief descriptions of federal statutes pertaining to the circuit courts within a particular state.  The citations are to U.S. Statutes at Large; for example, “68 Stat. 8” is a citation to volume 68, page 8 of that publication (for more information on judicial statutes, see Spotlight on Judicial History: The Codification of Federal Statutes on the Judiciary). The statutes cited on these pages relate mostly to the establishment of circuit courts, the occasional grant to a U.S. district court of circuit court jurisdiction, and changes in the state’s circuit assignment.

Meeting Places:

Congressional statutes authorized specific locations where circuit courts could be held (interactive maps of federal court authorized meeting places can be seen here). The lists on these pages show, for each judicial district, the cities Congress authorized as circuit court meeting places and the years each city was so authorized. On occasion, a meeting place was transferred from one district to another in the same state as a result of a district reorganization. Courts did not necessarily meet in each authorized location in every year of its existence as a meeting place.

Records and Bibliography:

These pages show the location of each circuit court’s original records in the regional facilities of the National Archives as well as a list of books and articles pertaining to that specific court.

Other Circuit Court Pages:

There are two bodies of information that are displayed separately from the state-by-state circuit court pages:

U.S. Circuit Courts, 1801-1802:

The first concerns the U.S. circuit courts that existed only from 1801-1802, interrupting the organizational structure that otherwise prevailed from 1789 to 1911. These circuit courts were organized by numbered circuit rather than by judicial district. The four categories of information for these courts (Judges, Legislative History, Meeting Places, and Records and Bibliography) are each displayed on a single page for all six circuits in existence during this brief period.

U.S. Circuit Judges, 1869-1911:

The second separate body of information concerns the judgeships created by the Circuit Judges Act of 1869 and subsequent acts and the judges appointed to those positions. Before Congress created a dedicated judgeship for each circuit in 1869, the circuit courts lacked their own judges (except for 1801-1802) and were instead held by justices of the Supreme Court and U.S. district judges. The two categories comprising this body of information (Judges and Judgeships, and Succession Charts) are each displayed on a single page for all nine circuits in existence during the 1869-1911 period.