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384 Edyta Sokalskaof a single national judicial system with one court, the United States SupremeCourt, serving as the court of last resort” 13 .Establishment of such system is strongly connected with the history ofthe country. The Constitutional Convention’s decisions in 1787 about thenational government were very important. There was an agreement thatthere would be a separate federal judicial power and to exercise it therewould be a Supreme Court and other federal courts. Federalists generallysupported the Constitution and the policies of President Washington’s administration.They were interested in establishing a lower federal judiciary.Anti-Federalists wanted significant changes and voted in favor of very limitedfederal judiciary 14 . On September 24 1789 George Washington signed“An act to Establish the Federal Courts of the United States” and sent hisnominations for the first federal judges to the Senate 15 .With the Judiciary act of 1789 Congress first implemented the constitutionalprovision that “the judicial power of the United States, shall be vestedin one supreme court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may fromtime to time ordain and establish” 16 . By studying the Judiciary Act of 1789and the subsequent legislation we can learn why the judicial system looks asit does today 17 . It should be underlined that, of course, in some ways, subsequentlegislation changed many of the 1789 Act’s specific provisions. The1891 Circuit Courts of Appeals Act effected a major change; the basic designestablished by the 1789 Act has wiped out a supreme appellate court tointerpret the federal Constitution and laws. A system of lower federal courts,separated geographically by state boundaries and sharing basically the samejurisdiction has been changed. The Act provided for two types of courts:district and circuit courts. A limited appellate jurisdiction was given to thecircuit courts. It made specific provision for the Supreme Court created bythe Constitution. It defined federal jurisdiction and authorized the courts toappoint clerks and to prescribe their procedural rules. There were createdthirteen district courts: one for each of the eleven states that had ratified theConstitution plus separate district courts for Maine and Kentucky. The actplaced each district, except Kentucky and Maine, into one of three circuits:13 W. Burnham, Introduction to the Law and Legal System of the United States, WestGroup Publishing, St. Paul 2002 (3rd ed.), p. 163.14 The opposition diminished quickly after the Constitution went into effect in 1789.15 More about late eighteen-century attitudes towards judges and lawyers see: J. Goebel,Antecedents and Beginnings to 1801, vol. 1 of The History of the Supreme Court of the UnitedStates, The Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise, New York 1971, p. 472.16 R.R. Wheeler, C. Harrisson, Creating the Federal Judicial System, Federal JudicialCenter 1994 (2nd ed.), p.1, [online] ,date of access: 8.05.2010.17 The evolution of the Judiciary Act can be fund in D. Eisenberg et al., The Birth of theFederal Court System, Winter, New York 1987, p. 18.