of a committee "to bring in a bill for organizing the judiciary
of the United States." This committee consisted of eight members,
five of whom, including Oliver Ellsworth, its chairman, had been
members of the Federal Convention. To Ellsworth is to be credited
largely the authorship of the great Judiciary Act of September
24, 1789, the essential features of which still remain after 130
years in full force and effect.

This famous measure created a chief justiceship and five
associate justiceships for the Supreme Court; fifteen District
Courts, one for each State of the Union and for each of the two
Territories, Kentucky and Ohio; and, to stand between these,
three Circuit Courts consisting of two Supreme Court justices and
the local district judge. The "cases" and "controversies"
comprehended by the Act fall into three groups: first, those
brought to enforce the national laws and treaties, original
jurisdiction of which was assigned to the District Courts;
secondly, controversies between citizens of different States*;
lastly, cases brought originally under a state law and in a State
Court but finally coming to involve some claim of right based on
the National Constitution, laws, or treaties. For these the
twenty-fifth section of the Act provided that, where the decision
of the highest State Court competent under the state law to pass
upon the case was adverse to the claim thus set up, an appeal on
the issue should lie to the Supreme Court. This twenty-fifth
section received the hearty approval of the champions of State
Rights, though later on it came to be to them an object of
fiercest resentment. In the Senate, as in the Convention, the
artillery of these gentlemen was trained upon the proposed
inferior Federal Judiciary, which they pictured as a sort of