Moreover, the booming dockets in the district and circuit courts meant a concomitant surge in the Supreme Court’s caseload. “[W]ith no other exclusively appellate court and an automatic right of appeal to the Court in many instances, the losing parties in such cases inevitably brought their claims to the justices.”[100] The Court’s docket in 1860 numbered 310 cases. In 1890, the number was 1,816 cases—623 of which had been filed in 1890 alone.[101]
Dissatisfaction with the federal courts’ organization and functioning spawned numerous reform proposals. These included calls for an intermediate level of appeals courts, an innovation that had been discussed for decades but had never gained sufficient support to be attempted. Other proposals included expanding the Court to eighteen Justices, half of whom would operate as a “National Court of Appeals.” Another proposal would have segmented the Court into three “divisional” panels, each responsible for common-law, equity, and admiralty and revenue cases, and with the entire Court hearing constitutional cases.[102]
Finally, in 1891, Congress passed the Circuit Court of Appeals Act, known as the Evarts Act in honor of its chief architect, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman William Evarts of New York.[103] The Evarts Act “fundamentally reshaped the federal judicial system” and “substantially established the framework of the contemporary system.”[104] For the first time since 1802, the Justices were no longer obliged to ride circuit. The Act also created intermediate courts of appeals, which “shifted the appellate caseload burden from the Supreme Court to new courts of appeals, and, in so doing, made the federal district courts the system’s primary trial courts.”[105] The reforms also drastically decreased the Court’s caseload by limiting the right of automatic appeal, and by making the decisions of the courts of appeals final in several categories of cases, including diversity suits and criminal prosecutions. The courts of appeals could certify questions to the Supreme Court, or the Supreme Court could grant review by certiorari; for state court cases, the review mechanism remained the writ of error.[106] Whereas the number of new cases filed before the Court in 1890 was 623, that number dropped to 379 in 1891 and then to 275 in 1892.[107] Three decades later, Harvard law professor and future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, along with his former student James M. Landis, offered the following characterization of the Evarts Act: “The remedy was decisive. The Supreme Court at once felt its benefits. A flood of litigation had indeed been shut off.”[108]
B. The Progressive Critique of the Court
The end of federally enforced Reconstruction by 1877 also redirected Republican energies from civil rights for African-Americans toward new forms of nationalism that prioritized economic development, property rights, and the interests of large-scale enterprise.[109] Critics
