Territorial judges, unlike federal judges, served short terms and could be fired at will

Evidence

Federal judges served for life, but justices of territorial supreme courts were appointed for four-​year terms and could be fired at any time. This thrust territorial courts into “perhaps the wildest political scramble in American history.” The phrase is from John Guice’s study of territorial courts in three western states. But Guice’s judgment was, in the end, far from negative: these Rocky Mountain judges, on the whole, were “civilizers, builders, and makers of law,” and they “contributed substantially to the territories and to the nation as a whole.” — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2193

Categorization

• XREF: Comparable to Friedman’s framing of western judges as law-makers in ch22’s frontier territory law material; here the institutional terms are stated plainly.