The latest issue of Judicature has a book review from Judge Wood, Thirteen Fiefdoms: Inside the United States Courts of Appeals:
There is no such thing as “the” federal court of appeals, in the sense of one massive intermediate appellate court charged with the duty of handling appeals from district courts and federal agencies across the land. Instead, what we have had since 19823 are 13 distinct institutions: the Courts of Appeals for the First through the Eleventh Circuits, known sometimes as the “regional” courts of appeals; the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit....
The choice of a given circuit to emulate one or more of its sister circuits is largely a voluntary one. From the outside, it may seem that the differences among circuits are unimportant and inconsequential. I doubt, however, that any student of procedure or institutions could finish reading this book and still hold to that view. It would be more accurate (if a bit melodramatic) to say that, at the intermediate level of the federal courts, we have 13 distinctive fiefdoms. When we lift the veil and see how each circuit operates, as Judge Newman and Professor Levy have done, differences large and small come into view. Each circuit prizes its own history, and each one not so secretly thinks that its own procedures are the best — or, more modestly, the best adapted for its own part of the country, its own size, and its own docket. One ignores these substantive and cultural differences at one’s peril.
Bloomberg Law has Memoirs, Sentencings, Secret Rules: Judges' Books in 2024
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