Uncontested Proceedings on Federal Dockets in the Early Republic

Abstract

This chapter describes the forms of uncontested adjudication that appeared on the dockets of the federal courts in the early Republic. Prominent among these examples was the practice of petitioning on an ex parte basis for a grant of naturalized citizenship under a law the First Congress adopted in 1790 to assign such work to the federal courts. Other examples include warrant proceedings, prize and salvage litigation in the federal admiralty courts, and veterans’ pension claims. Federal courts in the period agreed to entertain such proceedings as proper subjects of Article III adjudication and treated the resulting judgments as final and binding determinations of the right in question. There was no suggestion that the case-or-controversy language, or anything else in Article III, foreclosed such adjudications.