A Pacific Northwest federal appeals court

Congress should establish a new federal court circuit for the Pacific Northwest. It would help other courts and help the region.

Today, Washington is part of the federal 9th Circuit, which includes Alaska, Oregon, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Arizona, Hawaii and Guam. The 9th was created in 1891, when Washington had been a state only two years, Arizona and Alaska were still territories and Hawaii and Guam weren't even under the U.S. flag.

The 9th now covers 59 million people. When two vacant seats are filled, it will have 51 judges — more than double the number in the next-largest circuit.

Judge Richard Tallman of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals told the Senate Judiciary Committee Sept. 20 that working the 9th requires an inordinate amount of travel. His court is based in San Francisco but it sometimes hears cases in Seattle and elsewhere. Fully 70 percent of the district's cases are in California, whose swollen caseloads slow down the process of justice for every litigant in the Pacific Northwest.

Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., is pushing a bill that would shrink the 9th to California, Hawaii and Guam and create a new 12th Circuit composed of all the other states in the 9th. He specifies that the headquarters be in Phoenix, the new circuit's largest city and, not incidentally, in his home state.

Tallman makes the better suggestion. Make a Southwest circuit with Nevada and Arizona, each of them growing much faster than we are, probably adding in Hawaii and Guam; and a Pacific Northwest circuit consisting of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Alaska.

The Pacific Northwest circuit could be headquartered in either Seattle or Portland, each of which has an old courthouse available.

The Pacific Northwest circuit would cover 13 million people and would require eight active judges and seven senior judges. Between Republican Alaska and Idaho, Democratic Washington and Oregon and swing-state Montana, it would have some political balance.

Most of all, it would give this part of America, which has its own identity, a kind of legal standing it has needed for a very long time.