Federal Judicial Balance and Accountability Act¶

The Case for a Circuit-Aligned Court¶

Introduction¶

The Supreme Court of the United States currently has nine members. That number is not in the Constitution. It has never been in the Constitution. Congress has changed it seven times -- from six in 1789 to ten in 1863, and back to nine in 1869, where it has remained by convention for over 150 years. Nine is not a constitutional mandate; it is an inheritance.

This matters because the Constitution's silence on Court size means that any proposal to change it immediately confronts the accusation of court packing -- of selecting a number to achieve a desired ideological outcome. The accusation has force because, in modern political history, it is largely accurate. Proposals that surface whenever one party is dissatisfied with the Court -- from Franklin Roosevelt's 1937 plan to expand to fifteen, to more recent proposals for thirteen or fifteen seats -- share a common feature: they select a number that would, under the appointing party's control, produce a majority. The number is chosen, not derived.

The Federal Judicial Balance and Accountability Act (FJBAA), hereafter "the Act," approaches Court size from the opposite direction. The Act's fifteen-seat Supreme Court is not a choice; it is a finding. The number emerges from the application of three independently defensible principles to current United States population distribution -- principles that determine how many judicial circuits the country requires, which in turn determines how many justices the Court should have. This paper explains that derivation and defends both the principles and the finding.

The argument proceeds in stages. It begins with the historical record showing that the alignment between circuit count and Court size was functional, not coincidental, and traces how that alignment was severed in the nineteenth century. It then states the three governing principles explicitly -- before any number is mentioned -- so the reader can evaluate the methodology independently of its output. It presents the finding of fifteen regional circuits and traces the direct path from fifteen circuits to fifteen seats. It addresses the court-packing objection structurally, not rhetorically. And it closes with the observation that a court grounded in population mathematics is self-correcting in a way that no arbitrary number can be.

The full technical derivation -- including population data, compliance modeling results for both whole-state and district-level building block approaches, and explicit disclosure of every judgment call embedded in the methodology -- appears in the Technical Appendix. The Appendix is intended for readers who wish to check the arithmetic, examine alternative configurations, or evaluate whether the design judgments are reasonable. Nothing in the main argument depends on accepting those judgments on faith.

The Original Alignment: Circuit Justice Coverage as the Structural Basis for Court Size¶

The nine-seat Court is commonly treated as a constitutional baseline from which any deviation requires justification. This gets the history exactly backward. Nine was itself a departure -- a freeze point in a dynamic relationship between Court size and circuit organization that Congress had maintained, with functional purpose, for eighty years.

When the First Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1789, it created three judicial circuits -- the Eastern, Middle, and Southern -- and established a Supreme Court of six justices. The correspondence was not decorative. Under the 1789 Act, Supreme Court justices were required to ride circuit: traveling within their assigned regions to sit alongside district judges on the circuit courts, hearing cases and providing appellate oversight. Each circuit required judicial coverage. The Court's size was a structural consequence of that coverage requirement.

As the country expanded and new circuits were created, Congress expanded the Court proportionally. When a seventh circuit was added in 1807 to encompass Ohio and Kentucky, a seventh justice was added. When Congress reorganized and added an eighth and ninth circuit in 1837, the Court grew to nine. When Congress created a tenth circuit for California and Oregon in 1863, a tenth justice was added. The correspondence between circuits and justices was not a coincidence of institutional aesthetics; it was a reflection of the functional reality that each circuit needed a justice responsible for it.

This alignment remained coherent through 1869. At that point, the Judiciary Act of 1869 fixed the Court at nine seats by statute -- at a moment when nine regional circuits existed, so the numbers still matched. But the dynamic relationship had been frozen. No longer would a new circuit automatically imply a new justice; the correspondence had been converted from a living principle into a historical accident. The Circuit Courts of Appeals Act of 1891 completed the break: by creating a permanent intermediate appellate tier with dedicated circuit judges, it formally relieved Supreme Court justices of mandatory circuit riding. With the operational requirement for circuit coverage eliminated as a matter of daily judicial practice, Court size lost its last principled anchor.

The circuit justice role did not disappear entirely. Every sitting Supreme Court justice today holds a circuit assignment and exercises circuit justice authority -- reviewing emergency applications for stays, handling capital case appeals, and maintaining an administrative relationship with the courts of the circuit. What was lost was not the role but the principle connecting the role to the number of seats. Since 1869, the Court has had nine members regardless of how many circuits exist. The current system has thirteen regional circuits and two specialized circuits -- fifteen circuits total -- served by nine justices. Five of those circuits have no dedicated justice.

The Act restores the connection, not as historical sentiment, but as a recovery of the logic that gave the original alignment its coherence. If each regional circuit is to have a Supreme Court justice responsible for it, the number of justices should track the number of regional circuits. The question then becomes: how many regional circuits does a properly organized federal appellate system require?

A Framework Before a Finding: Three Organizing Principles¶

Restoring the circuit-to-justice alignment is only half of the argument. The other half requires establishing how many circuits the country needs -- and this requires principles stated in advance of any conclusion, so that the reader can evaluate the methodology independently of its output.

The Act establishes three principles for circuit organization. Each is stated here, with its justification, before any number is introduced.

Population equity. Citizens in one region should not face systematically longer case processing times, larger appellate dockets per judge, or reduced access to federal justice because of where they reside. The federal appellate system is a public institution; its capacity should be distributed proportionally to the population it serves. The current system fails this principle dramatically. The Ninth Circuit -- serving California, the Pacific Northwest, Nevada, Arizona, Alaska, and Hawaii -- handles the appeals of approximately 68 million people. The First Circuit, serving New England and Puerto Rico, handles the appeals of approximately 14 million. This nearly 5:1 disparity is not a reflection of regional legal complexity; it is a residue of circuit boundaries drawn in the nineteenth century and never fundamentally revised. Population equity, as a principle, is independently defensible: equal treatment under law requires that the infrastructure of justice be distributed equitably.

Tolerance band of plus or minus ten percent. Mathematical equality across fifteen circuits is unachievable. Circuits must be composed of existing jurisdictional building blocks -- states, or federal judicial districts -- that are fixed in size and location. The Act therefore permits a deviation of plus or minus 10% from the average circuit population. This band is sufficient to accommodate geographic constraints, contiguity requirements, and the granularity of available building blocks, while preventing the gross disparities that characterize the current system. The 10% figure is a judgment call -- it is disclosed and defended as such in the Technical Appendix, Section G. Readers who believe the band should be tighter or looser are invited to run the numbers under their preferred parameter.

Geographic contiguity. Circuits should consist of geographically connected jurisdictions. A circuit spanning California, Minnesota, and Maine would be administratively unmanageable, incoherent as a legal community, and impractical for the attorneys, litigants, and judges who must operate within it. Contiguity ensures that circuit precedent corresponds to something recognizable as a regional legal culture, that bar membership in the circuit is a coherent concept, and that judicial administration can be coordinated across the circuit's courts.

These three principles are stated before any number is mentioned because the number is the output of applying them to demographic reality, not an input that shapes how they are applied. A reader who accepts the principles and accepts the data should accept the finding. A reader who objects to the finding should engage with the principles -- the 10% tolerance band, the contiguity requirement, the equity goal -- rather than with the number itself.

The Finding: Fifteen Regional Circuits¶

Applying the three governing principles to the 2020 Census population data produces a finding: fifteen is the minimum number of regional circuits that satisfies all three simultaneously.

The arithmetic begins with the 2020 Census total population of 331,358,893. Divided across fifteen circuits, this yields a target of approximately 22.1 million per circuit, with an acceptable range of 19.9 million to 24.3 million under the tolerance band. This range is achievable -- not in every circuit simultaneously under every possible configuration, but in fourteen of fifteen circuits under the district-level building block approach, with one persistent outlier that is a consequence of geographic constraints rather than methodological failure. (The full compliance results appear in the Technical Appendix, Sections E and F.)

The case for fifteen is established from both directions: fewer circuits cannot satisfy the principles, and more circuits are unnecessary.

Fewer circuits cannot satisfy the principles. The test case is thirteen. With thirteen circuits, the average target population rises to approximately 25.5 million per circuit. California's 2020 population is 39.5 million -- 55% above a thirteen-circuit target. Texas's population is 29.1 million -- 14% above. Neither state can be brought within any plausible tolerance band at the thirteen-circuit scale while maintaining state unity. Even relaxing the whole-state constraint and using federal judicial districts as building blocks does not solve the problem at thirteen circuits: the populations of California and Texas are simply too large relative to a thirteen-circuit average to fit within a tolerance band that preserves any meaningful equity standard. Fourteen circuits fare somewhat better but still cannot resolve both California and Texas simultaneously. Fifteen is the minimum at which both states -- split along existing federal judicial district lines -- can be brought into compliance.

More circuits are unnecessary. Seventeen circuits would produce a target of approximately 19.5 million per circuit, and compliance modeling confirms that seventeen-circuit configurations can achieve high compliance rates. But seventeen circuits require two additional circuit administrative structures beyond what the fifteen-circuit model needs: additional chief circuit judges, additional clerks' offices, additional local rules, and additional circuit judicial conferences -- administrative complexity incurred without a corresponding equity benefit. If fifteen circuits achieve population equity (accepting the 14/15 compliance result as satisfactory -- a judgment call disclosed in Technical Appendix Section G), adding two more circuits serves no equity purpose. The principle of minimum necessary change argues for fifteen.

Fifteen is therefore the minimum sufficient number. Not a round number selected for appearance. Not a number calibrated to produce a particular Court majority. A number that emerges from the methodology as the answer to a well-posed question: how many circuits does a population-equitable, geographically contiguous federal appellate system require?

The full technical derivation -- population data, configuration testing, compliance tables, and judgment call disclosure -- appears in the Technical Appendix. Readers who wish to check the arithmetic will find every number sourced, every assumption stated, and every judgment identified as such.

From Fifteen Circuits to Fifteen Seats¶

With fifteen regional circuits established by population-equity mathematics, the connection to Court composition follows directly from the restored functional alignment.

Each of the fifteen regional circuits corresponds to one Associate Justice serving as its circuit justice. This is the functional role the original alignment served: a specific justice with a specific circuit, responsible for that circuit's emergency applications, capital case stays, and administrative relationship with the Supreme Court. The Act restores this correspondence as a matter of institutional design rather than leaving it as the current arrangement -- nine justices covering fifteen circuits, with five circuits unassigned.

The Act's Supreme Court has fifteen Associate Justice positions, one per regional circuit.

The D.C. Circuit and the Federal Circuit stand apart. Both are subject-matter courts, not population-based regional courts. The D.C. Circuit exists because federal agency litigation and administrative law are concentrated in the capital; the Federal Circuit handles patent law and certain specialized federal claims. Neither court draws its jurisdictional boundaries from population distribution, and neither generates a Supreme Court seat under population-equity principles. Under the Act, coverage for these two specialized circuits is provided by the justices serving as Co-Chief Justices -- in years eleven and twelve of their twelve-year active service period. The Co-Chief Justices hold the circuit justice assignments for the D.C. and Federal Circuits during their shared leadership tenure, ensuring that every federal circuit has dedicated Supreme Court coverage without inflating the Court's size beyond what population-based circuit organization requires.

The seat count closes at fifteen Associate Justice positions. Not fifteen as a floor subject to future political expansion. Fifteen as the principled output of the circuit organization methodology applied to current demographic reality -- no more, and no less, than the number of regional circuits the population warrants.

The Court-Packing Accusation and Its Structural Answer¶

The most predictable objection to a fifteen-seat Supreme Court is that it is court packing by another name -- that the circuit reorganization rationale is window dressing for a number chosen to produce a preferred majority, and that the methodology was constructed after the number was selected rather than before.

This objection cannot be defeated through argument alone; skeptics who begin with the premise of bad faith will find ways to sustain it regardless of the evidence. What the methodology can do is satisfy a good-faith evaluator who applies the appropriate test: not "can I imagine a partisan motive for this number?" but "would this methodology have produced a different number under different circumstances?" If the answer to the latter question is yes, then the number is genuinely derived rather than predetermined.

The answer is unambiguously yes. The population-equity methodology would produce a different circuit count -- and therefore a different seat count -- under different demographic conditions. If California's population were 20 million rather than 39.5 million, thirteen-circuit compliance would be achievable and the Act's circuit count might be thirteen. If U.S. population doubled and concentrated further in coastal metros, the methodology would eventually yield sixteen or seventeen circuits. The number follows from the facts, not from a preference about what the facts should mean. A critic who believes the tolerance band should be 8% rather than 10% should run the same exercise under that parameter and see what circuit count results. If fifteen emerges from that exercise as well, the number is robust. If a different number emerges, the critic has identified a genuine methodological question worth debating -- which is precisely the purpose of disclosing the judgment calls.

The structural argument is ultimately more important than any particular transparency measure. What distinguishes principled expansion from court packing is the presence or absence of a stopping principle.

Traditional court packing has none. If Congress adds four seats to produce a thirteen-seat Court reflecting one party's preferences, the opposing party adds six when it regains power. The Court grows to nineteen, then twenty-five, driven only by partisan appetite. There is no principled answer to the question "why stop here?" because partisan packing contains no stopping principle; it contains only an interest in advantage.

The Act's circuit-aligned sizing has a stopping principle built into the methodology itself. The seat count follows from the circuit count. The circuit count follows from population equity applied to current demographics. Future seats require future circuits. Future circuits require a finding that fifteen circuits can no longer maintain compliance -- a finding made by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts through the same population-equity methodology, not by a Congress with a partisan agenda. The mechanism for future expansion requires the Administrative Office to determine that boundary adjustments alone cannot restore compliance to acceptable levels, report the minimum number of additional circuits required, and obtain congressional authorization. Neither the Administrative Office nor Congress has an independent incentive to expand circuits beyond what population equity demands, because the circuit count is not a lever for partisan advantage -- it is a consequence of geography and demographics.

A Self-Correcting Architecture¶

The Act does not freeze the Court at fifteen seats any more than the Founders froze it at six. What the Act does is establish the principles and the mechanism through which any future adjustment must be justified.

The fifteen-seat Court is not the Act's goal. It is the Act's finding, as of 2020 Census data. If United States population grows substantially and concentrates in ways that eventually render fifteen circuits mathematically insufficient -- a scenario that might arise with significant population growth and continued Sun Belt concentration -- the same methodology that produced fifteen will determine whether sixteen or seventeen are required. The five-year compliance assessment cycle built into the Act's circuit organization provisions provides the ongoing mechanism: authoritative assessments after each decennial census, interim assessments using American Community Survey data between censuses, and a tiered response framework that triggers mandatory rebalancing only when systemic degradation warrants it.

A Court grounded in population mathematics inherits the self-correcting character of the methodology. The number adjusts when the facts change. It does not adjust when political preferences change. This is the institutional design property that distinguishes principled expansion from arbitrary expansion -- not that the number is fixed, but that the process for changing it is principled.

The accusation of court packing will be made regardless. Critics who oppose the Act's structural reforms will reach for the most familiar and rhetorically potent objection available. The response is not to deny the accusation but to invite the analysis. The methodology is transparent. The data is public. The judgment calls are disclosed. Every number in this paper and in the Technical Appendix can be verified against 2020 Census data and the statutory definitions of federal judicial districts. The derivation is reproducible by any reader with access to that data and the patience to run the analysis.

A fifteen-seat Supreme Court grounded in that derivation is not court packing. It is what principled institutional design looks like when it takes population equity seriously.

Technical Appendix: Population Equity and Circuit Count -- A Full Derivation¶

This appendix presents the complete derivation of the fifteen-circuit finding underlying the Act's circuit organization provisions. It is intended for readers who wish to check the methodology, examine alternative configurations, or evaluate whether the judgment calls embedded in the approach are reasonable. Every number used in the main paper is sourced here. Every assumption is identified. Every design judgment is labeled as such.

A. The Governing Principles in Detail¶

The main paper states three organizing principles. This section defines each with the precision required for independent verification and replication.

Population equity. Each regional circuit should serve approximately equal resident populations, as measured by the most recent decennial census. Resident population -- not voting-age population, citizen population, or registered voter population -- is the appropriate measure because federal appellate jurisdiction extends to all persons residing within the circuit regardless of citizenship, age, or voting status. The equity target is a simple average: total population divided by the number of circuits.

Tolerance band of plus or minus 10%. Perfect population equality is unachievable given that circuits must be constructed from jurisdictional building blocks of fixed size. The 10% tolerance band defines the acceptable range of deviation from the average circuit population. At the 2020 Census baseline, this produces a band of 19,881,534 to 24,299,652 (see Section B). Circuits within this range are "in band"; circuits outside it are outliers requiring attention.

This is a design judgment. A 5% band would be geometrically much harder to achieve and would likely require a higher circuit count to satisfy simultaneously with contiguity. A 15% band would permit larger disparities while achieving higher compliance rates. The 10% figure reflects a judgment that it is achievable under the district-level building block approach (see Section F) while representing a qualitative improvement over the current system's near-5:1 disparities. Readers who prefer a different band should assess whether their preferred tolerance produces a meaningfully different circuit count.

Geographic contiguity. A circuit is contiguous if every jurisdiction within it can be reached from every other jurisdiction through a chain of adjacent jurisdictions within the same circuit. Adjacency is assessed at the county level, using the U.S. Census Bureau's county adjacency file. A circuit satisfies contiguity if, modeled as a graph where nodes are counties and edges connect adjacent counties, the subgraph of counties within the circuit is connected. Alaska and Hawaii, which are not physically adjacent to the continental United States, are treated as contiguous with any circuit containing Pacific coast states, consistent with the existing Ninth Circuit's practice and the inherent geographic reality of Pacific-facing judicial administration.

B. Population Baseline¶

All population figures are drawn from the 2020 United States Census, P1 table (Total Population) at the county level, aggregated to the federal judicial district level using the district definitions in 28 U.S.C. Sections 81-131.

Total U.S. resident population (50 states + D.C.): 331,358,893
Target circuit population (15 circuits): 22,090,593
Tolerance band lower bound (−10%): 19,881,534
Tolerance band upper bound (+10%): 24,299,652

These are the figures used throughout all FJBAA supporting documents. Minor rounding differences from the rounded figures used in the main paper (22.1 million target; 19.9 million to 24.3 million band) are immaterial for compliance assessment.

C. Why Thirteen Circuits Cannot Satisfy the Principles¶

At thirteen circuits:

Target circuit population: 331,358,893 ÷ 13 = 25,489,915
Tolerance band lower bound: 22,940,923
Tolerance band upper bound: 28,038,907

California's 2020 population is 39,538,223 -- exceeding the thirteen-circuit upper bound by 11,499,316. Texas's 2020 population is 29,145,505 -- exceeding the upper bound by 1,106,598. Both states exceed the tolerance ceiling under a thirteen-circuit framework.

Under a whole-state constraint (no state divided between circuits), neither California nor Texas can be assigned to any circuit within the band. Both states are permanent outliers at the thirteen-circuit scale.

Under a district-level constraint (states may be divided along existing federal judicial district boundaries), California's four districts range from approximately 4.1 million (Eastern) to 19.5 million (Central). Even the Central District alone approaches the thirteen-circuit target; pairing two California districts produces circuits well above the upper bound. The geometry does not resolve: California's population mass is too large relative to the thirteen-circuit target for any district-level splitting to produce compliant circuits on both sides.

Fourteen circuits produce a target of approximately 23.7 million with a band of 21.3 million to 26.0 million. This is more manageable, but Texas (29.1 million) still exceeds the upper bound and requires splitting into configurations that place California's districts under additional stress. Modeling does not identify a satisfactory fourteen-circuit solution.

At fifteen circuits, both the California and Texas splitting problems become tractable under the district-level building block approach. This is the threshold at which population equity becomes achievable.

D. Why Seventeen Circuits Are Unnecessary¶

At seventeen circuits:

Target circuit population: 331,358,893 ÷ 17 = 19,491,700
Tolerance band lower bound: 17,542,530
Tolerance band upper bound: 21,440,870

This range is achievable. District-level modeling produces seventeen-circuit configurations with compliance rates comparable to the fifteen-circuit results. However, seventeen circuits require creating two additional circuit administrative structures: two additional chief circuit judge positions, two additional circuit clerks' offices, two additional sets of circuit local rules, and two additional circuit judicial conferences. These are not trivial costs.

The principle of minimum necessary change -- a value judgment embedded in the Act's design -- holds that administrative complexity should be incurred only when equity principles require it, not merely when it is achievable. If fifteen circuits achieve population equity (accepting 14/15 in-band compliance as satisfactory; see Section G), two additional circuits serve no equity purpose. They would add cost, fragmentation, and complexity without a corresponding improvement in the population balance the system achieves.

The Act's circuit count adjustment mechanism reflects this principle: if future population growth renders fifteen circuits insufficient, the Administrative Office determines and reports the minimum additional circuits required -- not a preferred number, not a politically convenient number, but the minimum the methodology demands.

E. The Whole-State Constraint and Why It Fails¶

The Act's original formulation required that no state be divided between circuits -- an intuitively appealing constraint that preserves state unity in circuit assignment and simplifies political communication.

Comprehensive optimization testing applied to 2020 Census data demonstrates that this constraint is mathematically incompatible with the Act's population equity requirements. The best whole-state configuration tested achieved only 10 of 15 circuits within the tolerance band -- 67% compliance. Three structural outliers cannot be resolved under any whole-state arrangement:

California (39,538,223): 79% above the fifteen-circuit target. No whole-state assignment places California within the tolerance band.
Texas (29,145,505): 32% above the fifteen-circuit target. No whole-state assignment places Texas within the tolerance band.
New England (approximately 15,099,000): 32% below the fifteen-circuit target. The six New England states together are insufficient to anchor their own circuit; they need population from neighboring states to reach the lower bound, but those states have their own assignment constraints.

No assignment algorithm resolves all three simultaneously under a whole-state constraint. The compliance ceiling under whole-state building blocks is approximately 67%.

This finding led to the adoption of the district-level building block approach described in Section F.

F. The District-Level Approach and Compliance Results¶

The 89 federal judicial districts (plus the District of Columbia) are the natural sub-state building blocks for circuit construction. They are created by federal statute, with boundaries defined by 28 U.S.C. Sections 81-131. They have established administrative infrastructure, separate clerks' offices, and defined geographic jurisdictions. They are the least disruptive sub-state unit available for circuit construction: no new boundaries are created, and reassigning districts between circuits is internal federal court reorganization rather than a federalism intrusion.

Critically, no single federal judicial district exceeds the fifteen-circuit tolerance band ceiling. The largest district -- California's Central District, serving the Los Angeles metropolitan area -- has a population of approximately 19.5 million, below the 24.3 million ceiling. Full compliance is therefore theoretically achievable if districts can be assembled in the right configurations.

Using districts as building blocks, systematic optimization testing identifies two high-compliance configurations. Both are presented below.

Recommended Configuration (Config M): 14 of 15 In Band

Circuit	Name	Population	Deviation	In Band?
1st	Southern California	22,538,280	+2.0%	Yes
2nd	Northern California-Nevada	20,104,557	−9.0%	Yes
3rd	Northwest-Northern Plains	21,168,258	−4.2%	Yes
4th	Mountain-Southwest	21,252,234	−3.8%	Yes
5th	Gulf States	23,766,829	+7.6%	Yes
6th	South Central	21,834,357	−1.2%	Yes
7th	Upper Mississippi	20,945,494	−5.2%	Yes
8th	Great Lakes	21,836,435	−1.2%	Yes
9th	Ohio Valley	22,071,048	−0.1%	Yes
10th	Appalachian	20,400,988	−7.6%	Yes
11th	Southeast	20,508,021	−7.2%	Yes
12th	Florida	21,538,187	−2.5%	Yes
13th	Chesapeake	21,828,678	−1.2%	Yes
14th	Metro New York	23,440,591	+6.1%	Yes
15th	New England-Keystone	28,124,936	+27.3%	No

Compliance: 14/15 in band. Mean absolute deviation: 5.7%. Population ratio (largest to smallest): 1.40:1.

Alternative Configuration (Config N): 14 of 15 In Band, Lower Peak Deviation

Config N moves Pennsylvania's Western District from the 15th Circuit to the 9th, reducing the 15th Circuit's deviation while pushing the 9th Circuit slightly out of band. All other circuits are identical to Config M.

Circuit	Change from Config M	Population	Deviation	In Band?
9th	Ohio Valley (+PA-W)	25,946,248	+17.5%	No
15th	New England-Upstate (−PA-W)	24,249,736	+9.8%	Yes

Compliance: 14/15 in band. Mean absolute deviation: 5.7%. Population ratio: 1.29:1.

The Persistent Outlier

Both configurations produce one out-of-band circuit. This is a consequence of geographic constraints, not of the methodology. New England's population (approximately 15.1 million) falls well below the lower bound, requiring the addition of upstate New York and portions of Pennsylvania to bring the circuit into range. But this addition, together with the district-level building blocks available in the corridor, produces a circuit that overshoots the upper bound. There are no federal judicial district boundaries within the New England states themselves -- each New England state constitutes a single district -- so no finer subdivision is available. The outlier persists across all tested configurations.

The 15th Circuit outlier does not invalidate the methodology. It is a structural artifact of the interaction between geographic isolation and the granularity of available building blocks. The Act's five-year compliance assessment cycle provides an ongoing mechanism to monitor population shifts that may bring this circuit into compliance over time.

G. Judgment Calls Disclosed¶

The following design decisions are embedded in the methodology. Each reflects a judgment that reasonable analysts might make differently. They are stated here so that critics can engage with the design choices directly rather than implying that the methodology conceals arbitrary or partisan decisions.

The 10% tolerance band. This is the most consequential judgment in the methodology. A tighter band -- 7% or 8% -- would require either a higher circuit count to achieve the same compliance rate, or acceptance of more out-of-band circuits at fifteen. A looser band -- 15% -- would permit larger disparities while achieving higher compliance. Ten percent was chosen as a level that (a) is achievable under the district-level building block approach at fifteen circuits, (b) represents a substantial improvement over the current system's near-5:1 disparities, and (c) is comparable to the tolerances applied in Congressional redistricting under one-person-one-vote doctrine. It is a judgment, not a derivation.

The minimum-necessary-change principle. The preference for fifteen over seventeen circuits rests on the value judgment that administrative complexity should not be incurred beyond what population equity requires. Readers who weight administrative simplicity less heavily than equity precision might prefer seventeen circuits. The Act's position is stated explicitly: the circuit count is the minimum sufficient to satisfy the equity principles, not the maximum achievable within some other constraint.

Treating 14/15 as satisfactory. The persistent New England-Keystone outlier means that fifteen circuits cannot achieve 15/15 compliance under any tested configuration using the available building blocks. Treating 14/15 as satisfactory reflects the judgment that geographic constraints external to the methodology -- specifically, the granularity of New England's district structure -- should not invalidate a methodology that achieves 93% compliance and reduces mean absolute deviation from approximately 15% to 5.7%. The alternative -- demanding 15/15 before the methodology is valid -- would make reform hostage to a geographic artifact that no available building block approach can resolve.

District-level over whole-state building blocks. Moving from whole-state to district-level building blocks requires dividing states between circuits -- a feature the Act originally prohibited. The empirical case for the shift is clear: 93% compliance at the district level versus 67% at the whole-state level. The judgment is that this improvement in population equity justifies crossing state lines along boundaries that are federal statutory creations -- the federal judicial districts themselves -- rather than expressions of state sovereignty. Under the Act's revised Section 101(b)(3), whole-state assignment remains the preference; district-level splitting is permitted only where population equity within the tolerance band cannot otherwise be achieved.

Contiguity assessment at the county level. County-level adjacency is the most granular and geometrically precise definition of contiguity available for this scale of analysis. State-level adjacency (requiring only that states share a border) would be looser and potentially permit non-contiguous-feeling configurations. The county-level definition produces configurations that are genuinely contiguous from the perspective of attorneys, litigants, and judges operating within the circuit.

H. Comparison with Current System¶

Metric	Current System	Fifteen-Circuit Config M	Fifteen-Circuit Config N
Regional circuits	11	15	15
Circuits in population band	N/A (no target)	14/15 (93%)	14/15 (93%)
Largest circuit population	~68 million (9th)	~28.1 million (15th)	~26.0 million (9th)
Smallest circuit population	~14 million (1st)	~20.1 million (2nd)	~20.1 million (2nd)
Population ratio (largest:smallest)	~4.86:1	1.40:1	1.29:1
Mean absolute deviation from target	~15%	5.7%	5.7%
Justices per circuit	9 for 13 circuits	15 for 15 circuits	15 for 15 circuits
Circuits without dedicated circuit justice	4 of 13 regional	0	0

I. Sources and Reproducibility¶

All population figures are drawn from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2020 Decennial Census, P1 table (Total Population), at the county level. District populations are estimated by aggregating county-level census data according to the statutory district definitions in 28 U.S.C. Sections 81-131. The census data is publicly available at data.census.gov.

District boundary assignments were verified against the Administrative Office of the United States Courts' district documentation. County adjacency relationships were determined using the U.S. Census Bureau's county adjacency file and verified for symmetry.

The optimization was conducted computationally, testing more than fifteen distinct regional configurations with systematic iteration on the East Coast, which presents the highest geometric complexity. Full configuration output files are available upon request.

Reproducibility checklist. Readers wishing to independently verify the derivation require:

2020 Census county-level population data (available at data.census.gov, P1 table)
Federal judicial district definitions (28 U.S.C. §§ 81-131)
A county-to-district assignment table (derivable from the statutory definitions)
A county adjacency file (available from the U.S. Census Bureau)
A contiguity verification routine (any graph connectivity algorithm)

With these inputs and the stated principles, the fifteen-circuit finding is reproducible. The judgment calls identified in Section G are the points at which a reader's own analysis might diverge from the Act's methodology; those divergences are worth examining, not suppressing.

Works Cited¶

Chilton, Adam, Daniel Epps, Kyle Rozema, and Maya Sen. "Designing Supreme Court Term Limits." Southern California Law Review 95, no. 1 (2021): 1-69.

Frankfurter, Felix, and James M. Landis. The Business of the Supreme Court: A Study in the Federal Judicial System. New York: Macmillan, 1927.

United States. An Act to Establish the Judicial Courts of the United States [Judiciary Act of 1789]. 1 Stat. 73. September 24, 1789.

United States. An Act establishing Circuit Courts, and abridging the jurisdiction of the district courts in the districts of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio. 2 Stat. 420. February 24, 1807.

United States. An Act supplementary to the act entitled "An act to amend the judicial system of the United States." 5 Stat. 176. March 3, 1837.

United States. An Act to provide Circuit Courts for the Districts of California and Oregon, and for other Purposes. 12 Stat. 794. March 3, 1863.

United States. An Act to Fix the Number of Judges of the Supreme Court of the United States, and to Change Certain Judicial Circuits. 14 Stat. 209. July 23, 1866.

United States. An Act to Amend the Judicial System [Judiciary Act of 1869]. 16 Stat. 44. April 10, 1869.

United States. Circuit Courts of Appeals Act [Evarts Act]. 26 Stat. 826. March 3, 1891.

United States. 28 U.S.C. §§ 41, 81-131. Judicial Code, Circuit and District Definitions. Current through 2024.

U.S. Census Bureau. 2020 Census Redistricting Data (Public Law 94-171) Summary File. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, 2021. https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/2020/dec/2020-census-redistricting-summary-file-dataset.html

Revision history available in the raw file.

📥 Download this document (opens on GitHub -- click the ⬇ download button)

Prepared by Albert Ramos for The American Policy Architecture Institute