William M. Wiecek

The Reconstruction of Federal Judicial Power, 1863–1875

In no comparable period of our nations history have the federal courts, lower and Supreme, enjoyed as great an expansion of their jurisdiction as they did in the years of Reconstruction, 1863 to 1876. To a court, jurisdiction is power: power to decide certain types of cases, power to hear the pleas and defenses of different groups of litigants, power to settle policy questions which affect the lives, liberty, or purses of men, corporations, and governments. An increase in a courts jurisdiction allows that court to take on new powers, open its doors to new parties, and command the obedience of men formerly strangers to its writ. Thus it is that in crabbed and obscure jurisdictional statutes a hundred years old we may trace out great shifts of power, shifts that left the nation supreme over the states in 1876 and that gave the federal courts a greater control over the policies of Congress than they had before the Civil War.