University of Richmond UR Scholarship Repository Law Faculty Publications School of Law 1995 The mpI overished Idea of Circuit-Splitting Carl W. Tobias University of Richmond,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.richmond.edu/law-faculty-publications Part of the Courts Commons Recommended Citation Carl Tobias, The Impoverished Idea of Circuit-Splitting, 48 Emory L.J. 1357 (1995) This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the School of Law at UR Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Law Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of UR Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. THE IMPOVERISHED IDEA OF CffiCUIT-SPLITTING Carl Tobias* A half-decade ago, the United States Congress considered and rejected controversial measures that would have split the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit into two courts.1 The proposed Ninth Cir cuit would have included Arizona, California and Nevada, while the new Twelfth Circuit would have encompassed Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Mon tana, Oregon, Washington, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Congress fully aired, particularly in hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, all of the issues that were salient to the Ninth Circuit's divi sion. Nevertheless, Congress ultimately refused to split the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Senators representing every state in the latest iteration of the projected Twelfth Circuit recently revived the idea by introducing Senate Bill 956, a proposal that closely resembles the measure debated by Congress in 1990.2 The new bill's sponsors contend that certain factors, principally the Ninth Circuit's substantial size and burgeoning docket, have now made division of the court imperative.