Old City Hall's Court

Old City Hall, at Fifth and Chestnut Streets, was the main home of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1791 until August 1800, while Philadelphia was the national capital. Finished in 1791 as Philadelphia's city hall, it held the city council on the second floor and a courtroom below, and the city lent that courtroom to the federal judiciary, which shared it with the Mayor's Court. The Supreme Court then had six justices, with John Jay its first chief justice. It sat for two terms a year, in February and August, each about a month long, and heard an average of only seven cases a year, while the justices spent much of their time riding circuit, a duty they widely disliked. Some of the Court's first lasting decisions came out of these years.

In Chisholm v. Georgia in 1793 it ruled 4 to 1 that the Constitution overrode a state's claim of sovereign immunity, letting the executor of a South Carolina citizen's estate sue Georgia, and Congress quickly proposed the Eleventh Amendment, ratified in 1795, to reverse it. In Ware v. Hylton in 1796 it held that a federal treaty took precedence over a conflicting state law. In Hylton v. United States the same year it upheld a federal tax on carriages, the first time the Court weighed whether an act of Congress was constitutional. Alexander Hamilton, by then retired from the Treasury, argued the government's side, his only appearance before the Supreme Court as an attorney.

The Court also sat at times in the State House next door and in Congress Hall. When the government moved to Washington in 1800 no building had been planned for it, and it occupied rooms lent by Congress.