Foreword

It has been just over one hundred years since Congress passed the Evarts Act establishing the circuit court of appeals on March 3, 1891. The first session of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals was convened in San Francisco on June 16, 1891, by Circuit Justice Stephen J. Field. The story of that circuit now spans more than a century, a period of western expansion and development that is reflected in the cases and opinions of the circuit court. This remarkable history through the first fifty years is here recounted by David Frederick.

The Evarts Act signaled a significant change for the Supreme Court of the United States and its justices. The establishment of a court of appeals and the expansion of the discretionary power of the Supreme Court to grant or deny review in many cases meant that from 1891 on the great majority of federal court appellate decision making would be made at the level of the circuit court of appeals. That effect is still felt today as the Supreme Court on which I sit accepts for review each term less than 2 percent of the petitions filed. The great bulk of federal case law is developed and made in the courts of appeals. It is there that we must look for a broad understanding of federal law.

Mr. Frederick has wisely chosen to analyze how the Ninth Circuit helped shape the development of the West from 1891 to 1941. This work chronicles the story of how a federal case helped save my alma mater, Stanford University. It relates how the court dealt with the exclusion of Chinese in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It explains how the court averted a crisis during the Alaska gold rush days. These

and many other illustrations of the court's role in western expansion make fascinating reading.

Wallace Stegner has written:

There is something to the notion of western independence; there is something about living in big empty space, where people are few and distant, under a great sky that is alternately serene and furious, exposed to sun from four in the morning till nine at night, and to a wind that never seems to rest—there is something about exposure to that big country that not only tells an individual how small he is, but steadily tells him who he is.
Wallace Stegner,
Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs (1992)

The reader will have a rich and rewarding experience following the history of the largest and most diverse federal circuit in the "big country." Through it we can better learn who we are.

JUSTICE SANDRA DAY O'CONNOR