Milwaukee Chicago and St. Paul Railway Company v. the State of Minnesota - "our Overworked Supreme Court"

Cartoonist Joseph Keppler depicted "Our Overworked Supreme Court" in a cartoon with that caption published in the humor magazine Puck on 9 December 1885. The scene showed the Supreme Court justices awash amidst a pile of paper. It symbolized the extraordinary caseload in which the court was regularly mired at the time.

In the Supreme Court of John Jay, the first chief justice (1789-95), the caseload was light, and Justices often spent time on administrative matters. By the time of the Civil War, the size of the docket had grown to some 300 cases. By the time of Keppler's cartoon, the Court was swamped with more than 1,300 cases.

In 1891, Congress gave the Court some relief with the passage of the Circuit Court of Appeals Act, which established the appellate court system as a buffer between the lower courts and the High Court.