There is some interesting information on the Wikipedia page for state Intermediate Appellate Courts. There are nine states without intermediate courts: Delaware, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming. New Hampshire is the largest, although not by much over Maine.
The oldest intermediate court is in Illinois (1877). Some other old ones are Louisiana (1879), Indiana (1891), Texas (1891), Colorado (1891), Pennsylvania (1895), New York (1896). The Evarts Act also established the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals in 1891, which was a very big year for intermediate appellate courts.
The newest intermediate courts are Nevada (2014), and before that Mississippi (1995). Alabama has two intermediate courts, both established in 1969. Pennsylvania also has two, dating to 1895 and 1968. There are no doubt readers who know why Pennsylvanians decided they needed a second appellate court after 73 years, instead of expanding the original one, but I don't.
The biggest surprise, to me, is Massachusetts, which did not have an intermediate court until 1972, despite having the oldest continuously functioning higher court in the U.S. -- the Supreme Judicial Court -- dating to 1692. (Pennsylvania disputes that, based on the origin of its Provincial Court in 1684, though it may not have been formalized as the Supreme Court until 1722.)
The number of appellate judges (or justices) varies widely. California predictably has the most at 105, which comes to one for every 376,000 people. Texas is next with 80, or one per 362,000. That seems like a fairly constant ratio of appellate judges per capita, at least in big states like Florida’s 58 (one per 368,000) and New York’s 60 (one per 324,000). But Illinois has nearly as many appellate justices much bigger Florida and New York, and therefore more per capita, with 54 (one per only 233,000).
Less populous states, of course, necessarily have a smaller ratio of people per judge, given that there have to be multiple justices to constitute a court. Thus, Alaska’s four justices constitute one per 182,000 people, about double the rate for the three biggest states. Ohio has roughly the same concentration of appellate judges as Alaska, even though it is fifteen times the size. It’s 68 appellate justices are more than any state except California and Texas, coming to one for every 172,000 Ohioans.
Louisiana, however, is the true outlier. Its 54 appellate judges amount to one for every 86,000 people – more than double the per capita rate in Alaska, and four times California’s. They must have (1) a lot of appeals in Louisiana, or (2) a bunch of underworked or inefficient appellate judges, or maybe (3) civil law appeals are just much harder to decide.
Pennsylvania is at the other end of the spectrum. Even with two appellate courts, Pennsylvania has fewer than half as many justices (24) as Illinois (58), with almost exactly the same population. That means one justice for every 533,000 people, which struck me as the likely record for low judicial density. But then I checked out Nevada, whose meager three appellate justices come to one for every 1,080,000 people, who evidently like to gamble on getting attention from that court.
I doubt there are any conclusions to draw from this, except that the people of Ohio and Louisiana must really like judges, and Nevadans and Pennsylvanians not so much.
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