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 In March 1789, weeks before a Senate committee had even been formed to draft a bill, an anxious James Sullivan—soon to become the attorney general of Massachusetts—wrote to his friend Representative Elbridge Gerry pleading for more news about the formation of the judiciary. “[T]he freedom of the people depends so much upon the proper arrangement of this part of the government,” he explained. James Monroe, not yet in Congress, told Representative James Madison that the judiciary bill “will occasion more difficulty, I apprehend, than any other, as it will form an exposition of the powers of the gov[ernment] itself, and sh[o]w in the opinion of those who organize it, how far it can discharge its own functions.” Senator Richard Bassett, a member of the committee drafting the bill, ventured to say that “our happiness as a people very much depends on this System.”

A Senate committee comprising ten members (one from each state that had both ratified the Constitution and sent senators by that point) produced a first version of the Act. The committee then sent its draft to leading lawyers, jurists, and officials around the nation, requesting their comments. What resulted was a compromise bill that attempted to balance competing interests, most notably the Federalists’ focus on establishing a strong federal judiciary with the Anti-Federalists’ desire to preserve state autonomy. Following several rounds of revisions and amendments, the bill won approval from the Senate and the House. On September 24, the Judiciary Act of 1789 was signed into law by President George Washington.

The Judiciary Act was far more than a restatement of Article III of the Constitution. As the intense debates surrounding the bill suggest, the provisions of the Act were hard fought, and the final version represented a set of choices about how the judicial power of the nation would be shaped. Even its supporters expressed reservations about the bill. James Madison wrote that the act was “pregnant with difficulties.” On the floor of Congress a few weeks later, however, he praised the bill as “as good as we can at present make it,” while noting that it “may not exactly suit any one member of the House, in all its parts.”

The Act provided for a six-justice Supreme Court: one Chief Justice and five associate Justices. It established the Court’s jurisdiction, both original and appellate. It also placed the Court at the top of the hierarchy of courts in the nation, state as well as federal. Section 25 of the Act granted the Court the power to review certain decisions of the highest courts of the states. This provision was viewed by some as particularly delicate, insofar as it placed the Supreme Court in the position of overseeing—and potentially overruling—the decisions of state court judges.