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Pennsylvania’s judiciary began as a disparate collection of courts, some inherited from the reign of the Duke of York and some established by William Penn. They were mostly local, mostly part time and mostly under control of the governor. All of them were run by non-lawyers. And although the Provincial Appellate Court was established in 1684, no court could be called the court of final appeal. Final appeals had to be taken to England.
Several attempts were made in the early years of the eighteenth century to establish a court of final appeal in Pennsylvania and to further improve and unify the colony’s judicial system, but because the crown had final veto power over all colonial legislation, these attempts proved futile. Finally, in 1727 the crown sanctioned a bill that had been passed five years earlier.
The Judiciary Act of 1722 was the colony’s first judicial bill with far-reaching impact. It established the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, providing for a chief justice and two justices who would sit twice each year in Philadelphia and ride the circuit at other times; and it created the Courts of Common Pleas in Philadelphia, Bucks and Chester Counties.
The court system in Pennsylvania did not change again until the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776. By establishing the Courts of Sessions, Courts of Common Pleas and Orphans’ Courts in each county, the constitution allowed Pennsylvania to see the beginning of a statewide framework for the development of its judicial system.
A new constitution in 1790 encouraged further development in the Commonwealth’s judicial system by grouping counties into judicial districts and placing president judges at the heads of the districts’ Common Pleas courts. This was meant to ease the Supreme Court’s rapidly increasing workload. Constitutional changes in 1838 and 1874 and a constitutional amendment in 1850 effected changes in the jurisdiction, tenure and election or appointment of members of the judiciary. In 1895 the General Assembly created the Superior Court to further ease the workload of the Supreme Court, giving each appellate court separate jurisdictions.
The Constitution of 1968 initiated the most sweeping changes in Pennsylvania’s judiciary in nearly a century, creating the Commonwealth Court to reduce the workload of the Superior and Supreme courts by hearing cases brought against and by the Commonwealth; substantially altering the minor court system and reorganizing the judiciary into the Unified Judicial System, consisting of the Supreme, Superior and Commonwealth courts; Common Pleas courts; Philadelphia Municipal Court; Pittsburgh Magistrates Court; Philadelphia Traffic Court; and district justice courts, with provisions for any future courts the law might establish.
Both judicially and administratively, the Supreme Court is, by constitutional definition, Pennsylvania’s highest court. In matters of law, it is the Commonwealth’s court of last resort. In matters of administration, the Supreme Court is responsible for maintaining a single, integrated judicial system and thus has supervisory authority over all other state courts.
In 1980 the legislature approved a decrease in the Supreme Court’s mandated jurisdiction by expanding that of the Superior Court. Consequently, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, like the United States Supreme Court, can now exercise discretion in accepting or rejecting most appeals, allowing it to devote greater attention to cases of far-reaching impact as well as to its constitutional obligation to administer the entire judicial system.
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