disagreement between the two judges in a district led to a postponement and a new hearing at which one or both of the same judges would sit. Furthermore, there were in effect two supreme courts which could produce different bodies of law for the two districts. In 1810 the General Assembly restored the supreme court to its original form. In the ensuing years the lawmakers again added a fourth judge, allowing the judges effectively to reinstate the two-district solution (because two judges made up a constitutional quorum), and required annual sessions of the court in bank (as a whole) to resolve conflicts and difficult questions of law. Nothing seemed to help. According to Judge John C. Wright, in 1834 the supreme court had 1,459 cases on its trial docket. To hear these cases the judges had to travel 2,250 miles through seventy-two counties. After deducting travel time, Sundays, and the month required for the court’s meeting in bank, Wright calculated that the judges had to decide seven cases per day, every day, for the rest of the year to keep up with the caseload.5
The common pleas courts also came in for criticism. As required by the constitution, the General Assembly initially divided the state into three common pleas circuits, each headed by a president judge. A court of common pleas, with two or three associate judges, sat in every county. The lawmakers added common pleas circuits until by 1851 there were twenty, but the courts still wallowed in a mass of business. The associate judges, often laymen with little legal experience, did not much ease the burden of the president, even though they could form a quorum without him. The presence of lay judges poorly versed in the law brought numerous complaints.6
Legislative “fixes”—the creation of several trial courts known as superior courts, abolition of the supreme court’s original jurisdiction in civil actions at law and in the trial of capital crimes, and elimination of the right of appeal to the supreme court—failed to satisfy anyone.7 When the constitutional convention opened, the courts remained mired in a bottomless bog of cases.
The president of the convention appointed Ranney to the committee on the judicial department, a thirteen-member body that included some of Ohio’s most prominent lawyers and politicians (1:64). Records of the work of the convention’s committees have not been preserved, but the published report of the convention debates suggest that the work of the judiciary committee did not always proceed harmoniously. On the question of whether district courts should meet in every county or only at two or three locations within a district, for example, the committee split 7–6, so that members had to “yield their own extreme views” to reach a compromise. However, Ranney never gave in on this point. Indeed, he refused to go along with the majority report as a whole. Henry Stanbery defended the majority report as “the result of long and arduous labor—of much discussion—of examination and comparison of a multitude of plans” that had “united the opinions of more than three-fourths of all the members of the committee, composed of gentlemen who have been for a long time in the practice of the law.” But Ranney submitted a minority report on behalf of himself and perhaps Samuel J. Kirkwood and Samuel Humphreville, two other Democrats who refused to sign the majority report (1:430–31, 592–93, 551).
Ranney ruffled his fellows’ feathers when he moved to amend the majority report to require each district court to meet in every county in the district. Joseph Swan argued that the majority plan would produce a more respectable bar. “[I]nstead of being insulated, as now, to each county,” he maintained, lawyers would get together in large numbers at the sessions of the district court. The bumpkins would be exposed to more learned and intelligent lawyers, and the court, which “seldom rises above the bar in learning and legal attainment,” would benefit in turn (1:591). Ranney took personal offense at Swan’s remarks. Swan, he said, expected “extreme temerity” from those with positions contrary to his own and described the men who practiced in the county courts “in no very flattering terms.” When Swan denied that he had directed his remarks at Ranney or any other member of the convention, Ranney retorted, “what difference does it make, when their marks will apply to any one who insists upon the establishment, of such a county court.” The tenor of the debate suggests that personal friction between Ranney on the one side and Swan and Stanbery on the other characterized discussions in committee as well (1:605).
Politics also intruded into the committee’s deliberations. Chairman William Kennon, a Democrat, complained that “it seems from the statement of the gentleman from Trumbull, [Mr. RANNEY] the whigs have over-reached us—the democrats of the committee have been over-reached by their whig associates. We—that is—a part of us have had our sagacity discredited.” While Ranney argued for his minority report in Jacksonian terms, he did not, at least in the reported debates, accuse the committee’s Democrats of knuckling under to the Whigs. Perhaps he leveled such charges during committee meetings or out of session; he insinuated as much in the convention’s second session. Or Kennon may have attributed to Ranney the comments of Democrat Daniel A. Robertson, a vociferous opponent of the majority plan. Robertson in essence accused the committee majority of gerrymandering in its proposal for judicial districts. “The gentlemen of the whig party in the Convention,” avowed Robertson, “could not have devised a better plan than this, to control the judicial system of Ohio” (1:631, 627).
The majority report proposed a judicial system that Ranney portrayed as too complex, too expensive, and too distant from the people. On one key point, though, everyone agreed: the judges would all be chosen by popular vote instead of by the legislature. The committee took this for granted from the start.8 On the lowest rung of the judicial ladder, as recommended in the majority report, stood the township justices of the peace, whose powers and duties would be established by the General Assembly. Then came a county court in each county, with jurisdiction over probate matters and with jurisdiction over such civil appeals and such original and appellate criminal matters as the legislature might provide. Above the county courts were the courts of common pleas. The committee left their jurisdiction entirely up to the legislature, although it apparently contemplated that these would continue to be the trial courts of general jurisdiction. The report called for the state to be divided into nine common pleas districts, in each of which the voters would elect three judges, one or more of whom would hold court in every county in the district as often as the legislature might require (1:586, 51, 431).
The majority report created a new intermediate appellate court called the district court. Each of the nine common pleas districts would have a district court consisting of the three common pleas judges and one justice of the supreme court, with any three of the judges making up a quorum. The district courts would have the same limited original jurisdiction as the supreme court, but their chief purpose would be to hear appeals. In a sentence that would provoke Ranney’s criticism and intense debate in the committee of the whole, the report required that district courts “shall be held in and for each district . . . as often in each year, and at such places in said district as may be prescribed by law” (1:431).
At the apex of the judicial hierarchy envisioned by the majority report stood the supreme court, with a chief justice and three associates. Any three of the justices would constitute a quorum. The report limited the court’s original jurisdiction to special writs and left its appellate jurisdiction up to the General Assembly. The court would hold at least one term annually in the capital and other terms whenever and wherever the legislature might require by law. The electors of the whole state would choose the chief justice. For the election of the associates the nine common pleas districts would be combined into three districts “of compact territory,” each of which would elect one justice. Every additional justice that the legislature might create in the future would be elected by the voters of the entire state (1:430–31).
Ranney’s plan differed radically from the majority proposal. His judicial system consisted of township justices of the peace; a county court in each county having jurisdiction over probate matters and both original and appellate jurisdiction over civil and criminal cases in which the amount in controversy did not exceed three hundred dollars; and a twenty-member supreme court whose original and appellate jurisdiction would be established by law. The General Assembly would be able to create a separate probate judgeship in any county having forty thousand or more people as well as other courts inferior to the supreme court
