Midnight Judges Act - The Midnight Judges

The Midnight Judges

In the nineteen days between passage of this Act and the conclusion of his administration, President Adams quickly filled as many of the newly created circuit judgeships as possible. The new judges were known as the Midnight Judges because Adams was said to be signing their appointments at midnight prior to President Thomas Jefferson's inauguration. (Actually, only three commissions were signed on his last day.) The famous Supreme Court case of Marbury v. Madison involved one of these "midnight" appointments, although it was an appointment to a judgeship of the District of Columbia, which was authorized under a different Act of Congress, not the Judiciary Act.

Attempts to solve this situation before and throughout the presidency of John Adams were overshadowed by more pressing foreign and domestic issues that occupied Congress during the early years of the nation’s development. None of those attempts to fix the situation facing the Supreme Court was successful until John Adams took control in 1797. Faced with the Election of 1800, a watershed moment in American history that represented not only the struggle to correctly organize the foundation of the United States government but also the culmination of struggle between the waning Federalist Party and the rising Democratic-Republican Party, John Adams successfully reorganized the nation’s court system with the Judiciary Act of 1801.