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Federalism and the American court organization385an Eastern, A Middle and a Southern, following the administrative divisionsused in the first year of the Revolutionary War 18 .It can be observed that federalists made important concessions to createa federal judicial system. The Judiciary Act bowed to anti-federalists in twogeneral ways: it restricted federal jurisdiction more than the Constitutionrequired, and it tied the federal courts to the legal and political cultures ofthe states. The Federalists obtained their purpose of establishing a federaltrial judiciary rather than leaving all trials in the state courts. But thefederal courts created by the Act were not designed to be completely free ofthe influences of their states’ politics and legal culture. The federal judiciary’sindependence in protecting national legal rights against occasional stateencroachment has been sustained by factors other than the geographic structureof national court system 19 .The most curious aspect of the 1789 Judiciary Act was Congress’s decisionto create a major federal trial court but no to create any separatejudgeship for it. Two Supreme Court justices assigned to each circuit traveledto the designated places of holding circuit court and joined there thedistrict judge. In fact, early Supreme Court justices spent most of their timeserving as trial judges. Circuit riding was common in the states and attractiveto Congress for a few reasons. The most important factor was savedmoney.A major nationalist victory in the Act was the implementation of theconstitutional authorization of jurisdiction in cases “between citizens of differentStates” and cases involving aliens. Under section 11, the circuit courts,like the state courts, could hear suits when “an alien is a party or the suit isbetween a citizen of the State where the suit is brought and a citizen ofanother state” 20 . Federalists worried about the potential for control overjudges by state legislatures, which selected judges in most states and hadthe authority to remove them in more than half states. They stated thatstate judges may be reluctant to enforce unpopular contracts or generally tofoster the stable legal conditions necessary to avoid a return to the conditionsunder the Articles of Confederation.Anti Federalists believed that law suits would be too expensive. To quietthese fears, the Act established a jurisdictional minimum of $500, so that defendantswould not have to travel long distances in relatively minor cases, andmade state laws the rules of decision in the absence of applicable federal law 21 .18 R.B. Schlesinger, The Code Systems, [in:] John Honnold (ed.), The Life of the Law, FreePress, London 1964, p. 494–500.19 J.V. Calvi, S. Coleman, American Law and Legal Systems, Prentice Hall, New Jersey2009 (6th ed.), p. 30.20 R.R. Wheeler, C. Harrisson, op. cit., p. 6.21 H.C. Prichett, The American Constitutional System, McGraw-Hill, New York 1981, p. 20.