No. 81 — The Judiciary Continued, and the Distribution of the Judicial Authority. (Hamilton)

The paper opens with the question of whether inferior federal courts are necessary or whether the Supreme Court alone could handle all federal cases on original jurisdiction. Hamilton's answer is practical: a single court sitting in the capital cannot be practically accessible to litigants across a continent. Inferior federal courts distributed geographically allow federal jurisdiction to be exercised near the people who need it, with appeal to the Supreme Court available for cases of sufficient importance. The alternative — channeling all federal cases through state courts with Supreme Court appellate review — leaves the federal system dependent on state institutions for its day-to-day operation, creating the structural problem that the federal courts were designed to solve.

Hamilton addresses at length the charge that the Supreme Court's power to review facts as well as law destroys the jury trial. The Anti-Federalist argument was that if the Supreme Court can re-examine factual findings, then jury verdicts at the trial level are meaningless — the appellate court can simply substitute its judgment for the jury's. Hamilton's response is that appellate review of law and appellate review of facts are different functions operating by different standards, and that the common law protections of jury trial are preserved in criminal cases by explicit constitutional text. In civil cases, the question of what degree of appellate fact-review is appropriate is one Congress can calibrate through its authority to define the jurisdiction and procedures of the inferior courts.

The paper's most important passage answers the Anti-Federalist claim that courts capable of voiding acts of Congress are making themselves superior to the legislature. Hamilton repeats the argument of Federalist 78 in compressed form: the courts are not superior to the legislature; the Constitution is superior to both. A court that declares an act of Congress void because it conflicts with the Constitution is not imposing its own will; it is giving effect to the will of the people expressed in the supreme law. The legislature's acts are valid within the bounds the people have set; the courts enforce those bounds on behalf of the people who set them.