Bonus 123: The Judges' Bill Turns 100

A century ago today, Congress gave the Supreme Court control over much of its docket. The Court we have today is, for better or worse, a direct result of that technical but massively important statute

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Amid the veritable flood of Trump-related legal news, today also marks the 100th anniversary of the Judiciary Act of 1925—known then and since as the “Judges’ Bill.” Law professor Ed Hartnett may have put it best when he referred to February 13, 1925 as “the day on which the modern Supreme Court was born.” Indeed, it’s hard to overstate just how significant a role that one statute (and what the justices subsequently did with it) has played in giving us the Supreme Court we have today. In a nutshell, Congress not only delegated to the Court control over most (and, in 1988, almost all) of its caseload, but it did so in a way that ceded to the justices the ability to set almost every feature of the Court’s agenda—and, through it, the country’s.

More recently, as the Court’s middle has hollowed out, that control has led to a docket that is simultaneously smaller than at any point since the Civil War and dominated by high-profile, ideologically divisive cases to an extent we haven’t seen before. In short, the 100th anniversary of the Judges’ Bill is a good opportunity to remind folks of the control that Congress used to exercise over the Court’s caseload—and why the reassertion of some of that control would almost certainly be a salutary development.

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