New York had a court named Supreme, but its business was largely
the trial of original causes, and the Governor and Council
claimed the right of reviewing its judgments. The judges in 1765
denied the existence of such a right, but the King in Council
decided against them.[Footnote: Hunt, "Life of Edward
Livingston," 26.]

As soon as regular judges, not members of other departments of
the government, were appointed for the highest court, they were
generally required to perform circuit duty in the various
counties during part of each year.[Footnote: See
"Am. Hist. Review," III, 44.] This was a leading feature of the
judicial establishment set up in 1686 under Sir Edmund Andros for
the "Dominion of New England."[Footnote: Col. Rec. of Conn., III,
402, 411.]

South Carolina, for a hundred years, centered all her judicial
business at Charleston. No courts sat anywhere else and all the
lawyers in the State resided in the city. In the latter part of
the eighteenth century she followed the other colonies in
establishing a circuit system and county courts.[Footnote: Morse,
"American Universal Geography," ed. 1796, 690; Osgood, "The
American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century," II, 279, 300.]

There was occasionally some little approach to English form when
the colonial judges went on the circuit. In Massachusetts the
sheriff or his deputy was accustomed to come out from the court
town to meet the judges as they approached it, to open a term of
court.[Footnote: "Life and Works of John Adams," II, 280. See
Chap. XIII.]