Institutional History

The Supreme Court of New Jersey was established in 1704 when Governor Cornbury published "An Ordinance for Establishing Courts of Judicature" upon his appointment as royal governor of the colony. Placed under the jurisdiction of the English Parliament, the supreme court was granted the same powers as the courts of the queen's (king's) bench, common pleas and exchequer, namely, to have "cognizance of all Pleas, civil criminal and mixt" (Bradford, Ordinance of 1704). The court could either hear original cases or receive appeals from lower courts, such as justices of the peace and county courts of common pleas. In practice, the court's original civil jurisdiction tended to be limited to cases involving land or relatively large sums of money. Appeals from the supreme court itself could be made only to the governor and council.

The court's jurisdiction remained relatively unchanged under the state's first and second constitutions. The first constitution (1776) adopted the colonial judicial system almost wholesale. The supreme court's jurisdiction remained untouched, except that appeals would now be made to an elective governor and legislative council, rather than to their appointive predecessors. The second constitution (1844) somewhat diminished the court's stature by requiring that appeals from circuit courts be made not to it, but rather to a newly formed court of errors and appeals.

During the colonial period, the Supreme Court met somewhat irregularly in the first few decades before settling into a fairly steady pattern of meeting four times each year, at Perth Amboy in March and August and at Burlington in May and November. Between 1777 and April 1780, the British occupation of New York City forced the court to move its East Jersey sessions from Perth Amboy to a variety of safer locations, including New Brunswick and Hillsborough. Beginning in April 1780, the court convened all four sessions at Trenton. Court terms were set by statute in 1798 as the months of February, May, September and November.

225 West State Street
P.O. Box 307
Trenton, NJ 08625-0307
609.292.6260 (general information)
609.633.8334 (administrative office)
609.292.9105 (fax)