Why Supreme Court Justices Should Ride Circuit Again
As some of you may recall from my “ask the author” series in December, see here, I answered a number of questions as to why Congress should reenact circuit riding, which was a prominent (even dominant at times) aspect of the Justices’ job duties for the first 120 years or so of this country’s history.
My article discussing this issue at length (including its storied history) will appear in the June issue of the Minnesota Law Review, and I have posted the final version of the paper on SSRN, see here. One frequent reader of this blog and Supreme Court practitioner recently wrote me that it struck him that my proposal is so sensible that it probably has no chance of being enacted by Congress. Be that as it may, for a number of reasons, I think that the Court would be better off if the Justices would once again ride circuit, though I must confess that I do not propose that they do so on horseback or by carriage or stick gig.
I remember watching a video of a lecture Chief Justice Roberts gave off of C-SPAN’s website where he told a story about the late Chief Justice Rehnquist one summer assigning himself as a judge in a district court, but the 4th Circuit reversed his decision when it was appealed.
Comment by Phillip Edens — May 23, 2007 @ 11:59 am
Phillip: I actually relay that anecdote as well as a number of others in the article. One particularly interesting story is that Justice Stephen Field was almost assassinated by a litigant (and former colleague) while riding circuit in the west. He was saved by a deputy United States Marshal, who was later held for murder. The Supreme Court eventually that the deputy U.S. Marshal has an immunity defense to the prosecution.
Comment by David Stras — May 23, 2007 @ 2:18 pm