Thomas E. Baker

The Need for a New National Court

By any measure, the Supreme Court is tremendously overburdened with too many cases. Recently, some observers have suggested that this overwhelming workload can be alleviated by the creation of a new Intercircuit Panel, which would hear cases on reference from the Supreme Court. Such a court would hear cases primarily involving conflicts of federal law among the court of appeals. This commentary does not focus on the form of the proposed new court. Rather, it broadly considers two current problems with the federal court system: the unreasonably heavy workload burden on the Supreme Court and the inadequate capacity for achieving a satisfactory measure of uniformity in our national law. It then considers possible alternatives to an Intercircuit Panel, arguing that they are inadequate to solve these two problems.