The Pennsylvania High Court of Errors and Appeals was a public tribunal existing from 1780 to 1808; it was the court of last resort in the Commonwealth. The Pennsylvania General Assembly created it during the American Revolution to take the place of the British Appeals Committee of the Privy Council. The High Court heard cases from the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania and other lower state courts. Eventually the General Assembly voted to abolish the High Court, effective in 1808, and transfer its powers to the state supreme court.
Establishment
Until the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the ultimate tribunal for the American colonies was the Privy Council in London. Then as now, a committee of the Privy Council heard cases from certain overseas jurisdictions under the rule of the British crown. One legal effect of American Independence, however, was permanently ending the flow of cases to London from the newly-independent United States. A judicial void was left by the disappearance of the Privy Council as the final tribunal for the Commonwealth.
An Act in 1780 established the High Court of Errors and Appeals. The High Court's jurisdiction encompassed cases brought up from Pennsylvania's supreme court, register's courts, and state admiralty court. The establishing statute recited, "the good people of this commonwealth, by their happy deliverance from their late dependent condition [on Britain], and by becoming free and sovereign are released from this badge of slavery and have acquired the transcendent benefit of having justice administered to them at home and at moderate cost and charges." The 1780 Act permitted parties whose cases to the Privy Council had not been adjudicated by July 4, 1776−the date of American Independence−to refile their cases in the new High Court.
Name of the court
The High Court was called a court of "Errors and Appeals", and not a court "of Appeals" because in the English judicial process there was a difference between a proceeding in error and an appeal. "A writ of error ordered judges to send the record of their proceedings in a particular case to a superior court for inspection. ... The court of error could concern itself only with 'manifest error' revealed by the written words (as where an essential procedural step was missing), or with new facts[.]" The other party in the case would hear the alleged errors and could dispute them. After argument by the attorneys for each party, the court of errors could affirm or reverse the judgment of the lower court. In contrast, an appeal allowed a higher court to look "behind the record" of the written words and determine, for example, if the lower court had made a mistake in law in the case.
Courtrooms
Despite the difficulties of travel for almost 300 miles and across the Allegheny Mountains from the western part of Pennsylvania, the 1780 Act directed that the High Court was to sit only in Philadelphia, in the far southeastern corner of the Commonwealth. In Philadelphia the High Court met in the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall), in the courtroom usually used by the state supreme court, directly across the vestibule from the Assembly Room in which both the Declaration of Independence and United States Constitution were debated and signed. In 1804, however, the High Court's sessions moved to the Philadelphia County Courthouse (now called Congress Hall), where it met until the court's dissolution in 1808.
Judges
When first set up, the judges of the High Court comprised the president of the Supreme Executive Council, the judges of the supreme court, the judge of the Pennsylvania admiralty court, and "three persons of known integrity and ability". Until its 1791 reorganization, the High Court's members included both non-lawyers such as Benjamin Franklin, and noted lawyers as Joseph Reed, and John Dickinson. Some of the existing judges were reappointed after the General Assembly reorganized the High Court in 1791.