The U.S. Courts of Appeals

For its first century the federal system had no permanent appeals courts. Supreme Court justices rode circuit, sitting with district judges to hear appeals, and by the 1880s the Court's own docket had grown so hopeless that cases waited three years for a hearing. The Evarts Act, signed on March 3, 1891, created nine circuit courts of appeals to absorb that work. The design proved durable. There are now thirteen: eleven numbered circuits covering groups of states, the District of Columbia Circuit, and the Federal Circuit, created in 1982 to hear patent, trade, and federal claims cases from anywhere in the country.

A party that loses in a federal district court has a right to one appeal, and the court of appeals for that circuit must hear it. Cases are decided by rotating three-judge panels on the written record and the briefs, usually with a short oral argument and no witnesses. A losing party can ask the full court to rehear the case en banc, which is rarely granted, or petition the Supreme Court, which takes about one case in a hundred. For roughly 99 percent of federal appeals, the circuit court's decision is the end of the road, which is why the circuits are sometimes called the real supreme courts of American law.

About 179 judgeships are authorized across the thirteen circuits, from six in the First Circuit to twenty-nine in the Ninth, which covers California and eight other western states. The courts of appeals decide roughly forty to fifty thousand appeals a year. Their rulings bind the district courts within their own circuit but not courts elsewhere, so the same federal statute can mean different things in Atlanta and San Francisco until the Supreme Court resolves the split. Circuit splits are the single most common reason the Supreme Court agrees to hear a case.

The D.C. Circuit holds a special place. Because so many challenges to federal agency rules must be filed there, it decides more administrative law than any other court and has sent four of the current justices to the Supreme Court. The Ninth Circuit's size and reputation have made it a recurring target of proposals to split it. Debates over the circuits tend to be about geography and workload rather than power, but the growing use of nationwide injunctions has drawn attention to which circuit a case lands in.