Very eary SCOTUS courts aren't quite right

[mlissner]

A volunteer contributor put together a spreadsheet (attached) of the correct courts. It looks pretty good and easy to do, if we have the ancient courts in our system.

@flooie I don't know when to slot this into your work, but it's an easy fix for about 200 cases. CL cases and courts.csv

[mlissner]

This is about 200 cases and it's such an edge case it's probably not worth thinking about too much. If a researcher or librarian wants to chime in with how this should really be put in our legal database, that would be welcome. Until then, this is on pause.

[zvisrosen]

This is a pretty famous bit of SCOTUS trivia, at least among ze nerds - the first volume of the US Reports includes no Supreme Court cases. The four volumes of reports by Alexander Dallas including many PA cases were later incorporated into the US Reports to cover the 1790s. I don't believe any reporter after Dallas included any non-SCOTUS cases. There's pretty good wikipedia entries for Dallas's Reports that might be helpful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Reports,_volume_1, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Supreme_Court_cases,_volume_2, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Supreme_Court_cases,_volume_3, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Supreme_Court_cases,_volume_4

[mlissner]

@zvisrosen I think the questions we had were ones like:

• was there even a concept of a supreme court back then, or did it only get established slightly later?

• in a legal database like ours should we label things that have top-court precedential heft as SCOTUS even if they're technically not? For example, I think some of these were argued in Pennsylvania...in front of SCOTUS justices.

• if you filter our db to SCOTUS cases, should these come up?

So it's sort of a question of correctness vs what is correct vs what do users expect (and should we defy that expectation in the name of correctness?)

[zvisrosen]

So, the cases in Dallas's reports, especially Volume 1, substantially predate the US Supreme Court, which was established in 1789 under the terms of Article 3 of the Constitution which require one. However, Volume 2 includes numerous US Supreme Court opinions. Under Chief Justices Jay and Ellsworth, the Justices issued their opinions seriatim like English judges - one at a time instead of in blocs or unanimously.

The opinions of Pennsylvania courts and federal lower courts in Pennsylvania have no greater authority for being reported by a quirk of fate alongside US Supreme Court opinions in what would become the U.S. Reports. Of course, there isn't much from the 1790s which has much precedential heft generally - the only one of any real consequence (Chisholm v. Georgia) was overruled by the 11th Amendment.

Ideally these wouldn't come up if not filtered for.

[mlissner]

Zvi! This amazing. I think that clarifies everything, and we've got the greenlight to fix these cases. Thank you so much!