In The Circuit Court Of The Sixth Judicial Circuit: Fill & Download for Free

In answer to the first part (“How is California able to restrict guns so much”), I give you the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit:These are just the 18 Senior Circuit Judges of the 9th Circuit; there is a Chief Judge and 22 additional Circuit Judges on the official roster, making the “Full Court” 41 strong. In practice, 29 of those are actually serving at any one time.Why so many judges? Because this is their geographic jurisdiction:All the numbered darker-blue states and territories are Federal Judicial Districts under the Ninth Circuit. This territory comprises some 62 million people, more than almost any other two Circuits combined (the Fifth, Sixth and Eleventh Circuits each comprise just over 30 million people, so any two of those would beat the Ninth but not by much), and in fact the State of California, if it had its own Circuit, would still be the most populous Circuit in the nation at 39 million people, and would still be a frontrunner for hearing the most business. Common subject matter of the Circuit deals with everything from telecommunications, copyright and software to littoral property ownership to defendants’ and prisoners’ rights. And yes, they hear a lot of cases about California’s gun laws.Federal judges tend to move up through the ranks within their geographical jurisdiction, from local and county courts up through the State systems and from there into Federal Districts. As such, the Ninth Circuit is largely “home-grown”, and the largest population centers in the Ninth Circuit, other than Phoenix, AZ, are in very blue-leaning California (San Diego, LA and Bay Area) and Washington (Sea-Tac). That’s also where most of the Court’s business comes from, and so names of judges in those Districts tend to be heard more often than those in Idaho or Montana, making them more likely to be tapped for Circuit seats. So, guess which way most of the Ninth Circuit’s judges lean ideologically, especially on guns and the Second Amendment.The problem is further compounded by the sheer size of the judiciary for the Ninth Circuit. The typical path of a case through the Federal system is to start with the District Court and be heard by one judge out of a rotation, then up to a three-judge panel of the Circuit, and from there to an en banc hearing by all the judges of the Circuit, and from there to the Supreme Court. However, the Ninth Circuit, being up to three times as large population-wise, has up to three times the judges of any other Circuit, and it’s practically impossible to get all 29 active Circuit judges in the courtroom at the same time. So instead, by Congressional exception, the en banc hearings of the Ninth Circuit are heard by a subset of 11 of the 29 judges, who are assigned to each particular case by the full Circuit. That gives the Ninth Circuit more power than any other Circuit regarding exactly what mix of judges will hear a particular case en banc, allowing the Ninth Circuit to basically “pack” itself - putting in enough highly liberal Senior Judges to overrule any of the conservative-minded Senior Judges from the panel decision, who must also sit for the en banc case.This is exactly what happened in Peruta v. San Diego County, which was initially decided by a 3-judge panel headed by Judge Diarmund O’Scannlain, one of the more conservative judges on the Circuit. The panel ruled 2–1 in favor of the plaintiff Peruta that San Diego’s (and indeed California’s) “good cause” requirement for a carry permit was unconstitutional. Peruta was satisfied with the ruling and San Diego County declined to pursue it further, so in response, Kamala Harris, then Attorney General of California (now the junior Senator, backing up one of the leading names in American gun control legislation, Dianne Feinstein), petitioned the court for an en banc hearing. That hearing was initially denied on procedural grounds (Harris didn’t have standing herself and missed the deadline to submit a petition), but then a sua sponte (“of its own accord”) review was requested by a judge in the Circuit itself and approved by majority vote, triggering the en banc hearing. The en banc court overturned the earlier decision, holding that California was not infringing Peruta’s right to bear arms outside his own home because he could still carry openly (which the court held was the essence of the right, ignoring the fact that the only legal way to open carry in California at the time was to sling an unloaded rifle across your back, a mode of carry that has since also been criminalized in the state). Therefore, the court reasoned, the State could restrict concealed carry as it chose, as most other States have traditionally done.So, the Ninth Circuit in Peruta undertook, all by itself with no appeal by anyone with standing to have the case heard, to reverse its own panel decision based on a request by one judge on the Circuit based on pleading from the State AG with no standing to argue the case, and upheld by a majority vote among a court of very neoliberal judges, which then selected a very liberal subset of itself to ensure the author of the panel decision would have no power to defend his opinion among the “full court”.Sounds like politics in the judiciary to me. Liberals are worried about SCOTUS having a politically conservative majority able to obstruct liberal efforts to legislate various policy changes; the 9th Circuit has been doing the exact opposite for decades.You also ask why the Supreme Court doesn't intervene. That's a good question, with three answers.First is that it doesn't have to. The Supreme Court, unlike any other court in the nation, can decline to consider any appeal presented to it. That’s by practical necessity, and has been for over a century; about 8000 cases are petitioned to the Supreme Court in each annual session, the overwhelming majority of which are questions either that SCOTUS has already considered, that are too narrow or small in scope and application (or conversely are very broad and stand to call into question large swaths of legislation, regulation and case law), are on topics about which the Circuits are in general agreement, or are otherwise cases the Court feels would not be an economical use of time and effort for all involved. While the issue of gun carry is a critical one to those affected by regulations restricting it, the “right to carry” issue is one very narrow in applicability considering how many people currently carry even in more permissive states (about 5% nationwide have a carry permit; remove the people and permit holders from the most restrictive states and you can about double that), and simultaneously one with the potential to affect the majority of the country’s population living in jurisdictions that heavily restrict firearms. As such, it’s an issue SCOTUS has been treading very lightly around.Second is that the Ninth Circuit creates a unique set of problems for SCOTUS in its sheer size. Even if it did think the Circuit was totally off-base in fundamental legal thinking, the 9th Circuit has 29 judges issuing opinions, while the Supreme Court has 9 Justices which must all hear and decide any case they grant cert on. The Ninth Circuit hears and decides a rough average of 11,000 cases annually with a little over a year’s backlog, divided among nearly 30 judges. That’s more cases than are actually appealed to SCOTUS annually, and about a hundred times more cases than they hear. While SCOTUS does overturn about 79% of the cases it hears from the Ninth Circuit (not the most, but up there), it only hears a very small percentage of the cases “terminated” by the Ninth Circuit, which is up to ten times the caseload of some of the “quieter” circuits such as the First Circuit. Even if it were willing, SCOTUS simply doesn’t have the capacity to send a message to the Ninth Circuit by reversing in lock step every decision made by the Ninth Circuit, and by even sending a message of any kind, like a strongly worded rebuke of every word in a particularly biased decision with a recommendation to correct their craniorectal insertion, SCOTUS risks opening the floodgates on Ninth Circuit cert petitions as it will be seen as hostile to the 9th Circuit and open to challenges thereof. Besides, you don’t want to piss off a judge, even as a SCOTUS justice, unless you are certain that he’s not long for the job; who knows, he may end up on the bench at One First Street beside you one day.Third, technically, only one of those Justices and their clerks (currently Elena Kagan and staff) are responsible for receiving, summarizing and making recommendations on all petitions arising from that Circuit. Kagan participates in the “cert pool", in which the workload of incoming petitions is balanced among all clerks, but Kagan still writes internal responses that influence the recommendation to the Justices of whether to grant cert, and at the moment, the majority of Justices participating in the pool are considered liberal (as are their clerks) so the clerks’ and Justices' recommendations for the conference regarding gun cases, especially out of California (9th) or the Eastern Seaboard (1st-4th Cir), tend to be colored that way.This is something we haven’t heard much about in debating why the Court hasn’t heard a gun case since McDonald, especially Peruta, but it’s a valid point of consideration; the conference memo for Peruta was more likely than not to have been written by the clerk of a liberal Justice, with Kagan’s input as Circuit Justice, and the Circuit assignments are largely along ideological lines with only a couple major exceptions. The best chance for a gun case to get in front of a conservative justice for review and recommendation is Third Circuit, which includes very gun-unfriendly New Jersey; this Circuit is assigned to Justice Alito, who is among the more conservative voices and who doesn’t participate in the cert pool, so the memo coming from his office would be more likely than most to recommend cert. Even then, Roberts (and Kennedy) seem so far to have been hesitant to hear another probable 5–4 decision, because even if the majority go pro-2A on the case, it’s another 5–4 split decision from “the Roberts Court”.There are various proposals to reduce the size of the Ninth Circuit, either by shifting some states to the Eighth and Tenth Circuits (with the Fifth or Seventh Circuits possibly getting a state from the Eighth or Tenth, possibly prompting a full nationwide realignment), or by creating a Twelfth numbered geographical Circuit and assigning either California or all the other Ninth Circuit states to the new Circuit.The problem with a split is that Circuits tend to be drawn along State lines, with the DC Circuit and Federal Circuit being notable exceptions, and as I said, even if California were its own Twelfth Circuit it would still be the largest one in the country by a significant percentage of population (about 20%), and would still require about 21 judges to handle the caseload. A smaller Ninth Circuit or a new Twelfth Circuit excising California would also give California’s lawmakers more power than they already have, as it would no longer matter which court system you chose, both the State and Federal systems will let California do as it pleases and only the Supreme Court could say otherwise. So far, the Roberts Court has been hesitant to tell the Golden State it’s done wrong on just about anything, so while this might make people in Oregon or Nevada happier, those of any conservative mind in California are likely to continue the exodus we’ve seen from the state.TL;DR:California is able to restrict gun as much as it does because its court systems, up to and including the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, has the government’s back on this issue.The Supreme Court hasn’t intervened recently because until June of 2018, the four conservative Justices had to be fairly sure of Kennedy’s vote in their favor.Even with Kavanaugh on the bench, Chief Justice Roberts is unwilling to have “the Roberts Court” be seen as a tool to walk back various local laws in a series of 5–4 split decisions; that has made the Court hesitant to take up another 2A case given that its last landmark on the topic prior to Heller was in 1938 with U.S. v. Miller.

The Federal Judicial Center (History of the Federal Judiciary) provides the following overview of the creation of the federal judicial circuits plus links to further details about each federal circuit and its constituent states:The Federal Judicial CircuitsSince the inauguration of the federal government, judicial circuits have provided geographical and administrative structure for the federal court system. For more than a century, the circuits functioned primarily as a way of assigning the justices and, after 1869, the circuit judges to service on the trial courts. The circuits and their courts embodied the federal character of the judicial system, connecting trial courts in districts that conformed to state borders and were governed by local legal procedures with a Supreme Court that had final jurisdiction over all of the nation’s courts.The Judiciary Act of 1789 arranged the judicial districts of the eleven existing states into three circuits, the Eastern, the Middle, and the Southern, and provided that justices of the Supreme Court would serve on the U.S. circuit courts that convened in the districts within a particular circuit. Congress regularly expanded and reorganized the system of judicial circuits during the first 70 years of the federal government. The number of circuits increased to six in 1801, seven in 1807, nine in 1837, and ten in 1855. Congress made even more frequent changes in the arrangement of states within the circuits in order to incorporate new states and to accommodate the demanding travel schedules of the Supreme Court justices. Occasionally entire states or districts within a state were omitted from the circuits because justices could not regularly attend courts far from established transportation routes. Only in 1889 was every district included within a circuit. With one exception in the mid-nineteenth century, the circuits have consisted of adjoining states.In 1866 Congress reorganized the states into nine circuits and established the geographical outline that has remained unchanged except for the inclusion of new states within existing circuits and the division of two circuits. In 1929, Congress divided the Eighth Circuit to create a Tenth Circuit, and in 1980 an Eleventh Circuit was established to include three states formerly part of the Fifth Circuit. The act establishing the circuit courts of appeals in 1891 gave the circuits a new jurisdictional role at the same time that reliance on the existing circuit organization gave the judiciary’s principal appellate courts a regional identity. (The Federal Circuit, established in 1982, is the only circuit defined exclusively by its jurisdiction.) In the twentieth century, the circuits have become increasingly important for the administrative organization of the federal courts. Representation on the Judicial Conference and its predecessor, the Conference of Senior Circuit Judges, has been allocated by circuit. The circuit judicial councils established in 1939 exercise administrative authority over all the federal courts within a circuit, and the circuit judicial conferences provide a forum for judges and lawyers to discuss the administration of federal justice within a circuit.First CircuitSecond CircuitThird CircuitFourth CircuitFifth CircuitSixth CircuitSeventh CircuitEighth CircuitNinth CircuitTenth CircuitEleventh CircuitEastern CircuitMiddle CircuitSouthern CircuitDistrict of Columbia CircuitCalifornia CircuitFederal CircuitFor District-level details, please see Creating the Federal Judicial System at Page on fjc.gov.

A couple of very wrong answers here.Below the Supreme Court there are 13 Courts of Appeals. Each corresponds to a “circuit”; there are 12 regional circuits and a Federal Circuit.The 12 regional circuits are divided into 94 districts.The reference in the Sixth amendment is to these divisions.When it was written, this applied only to trials in Federal courts. It has since been incorporated against the states by the 14th amendment, with (I believe) the understanding that the appropriate corresponding judicial administrative divisions within the state apply.The right to a fair trial is more fundamental than this requirement that the trial be held in the district where the crime was committed so if the courts rule that, for instance, it is impossible to empanel an impartial jury in that area, then the trial may be removed to another location.