Article. III.
Section. 1.
The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.
I am not your lawyer. This is not legal advice.
Here it is! We’ve plumbed the depths of the legislative and executive power, there must be a lot to say about the judicial, right? The short answer is, kind of.
One issue is, the drafrers of the Constitution had some issues with monarchy using the courts as a tool of oppression. But also, the drafters had seen courts that declined to be tools of oppression being dismembered and replaced with compliant arms of the government. How does the Constitution walk that tightrope?
First, we only have to have one court, but congress can set up any system of “inferior courts” as it sees fit. As a Texan (I’m a Texan, by the way, hello!) I can tell you that having a single court of appeals is not an effective way to run a court system. I’ll throw in a footnote here for anybody doesn’t care about Texas history, but know, it will hobble a court to make it run alone, despite the best intentions.1
And two, judges of Article III courts (the Supreme Court and those created at Congress’s discretion) serve for lifetime appointments, must be paid, and cannot have that payment decreased. So, they can’t be starved of capital and they can’t be removed on a whim. Although the courts are created by Congress, the creation has some substance.
Having mapped out the tightrope, maybe next week we’ll see which route we take.
- Originally (appx. 1846), Texas had but a single court of appeals, called the Supreme Court. In 1871, due to the massive backlog of cases, Texas split out criminal from civil jurisdiction, eventually formalizing in 1891 the existance of a second Court of Last Resort (but for criminal cases) in the Constitution, along with intermediate courts of civil appeals in Galveston, Fort Worth, and Austin, with the legislature able to create more courts. The longstanding joke is, with the creation of the 15th court of appeals in 2025, we’re finally ready to move on to the 1872 backlog. ↩︎