Appeal
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
an application for the transfer of a cause or suit from an inferior to a superior court or judge. It differs from a writ of error in two respects: (1) That an appeal may be brought on any interlocutory matter, but a writ of error only on a definite judgment. (2) That on writs of error, the superior court pronounces the judgment, while on appeals it gives directions to the court below to rectify its decree. (Blackstone's "Commentaries," book iii, ch. 4.) In the United States, the distinction between an appeal, which originated in the civil law, and a writ of error, which is of common law origin, is that the former carries the whole case for review by the higher court, including both the facts and the law; while the latter removes only questions of law. An act of Congress of 1875 provides that the judgments and decrees of the Circuit Courts of the United States shall not be re-examined in the Supreme Court unless the matter in dispute shall exceed the sum or value of $5,000, exclusive of costs. No judgment, decree or order of a circuit or district court, in any civil action at law or in equity, shall be reviewed in the Supreme Court on writ of error or appeal, unless the writ of error is brought, or the appeal is taken, within two years after the entry of such judgment, decree, or order; save in the case of infants, insane persons, and imprisoned persons, when the period is two years, exclusive of this term of disability. An appeal from a district court to a circuit court of the United States must be taken within one year. An appeal from the district court in admiralty to the circuit court must be made immediately after the decree, in open court, before the adjournment nt sine die; and it should be taken to the next succeeding circuit court. An appeal may be taken from the State courts to the Supreme Court of the United States, in cases involving the validity of a treaty or statute of, or authorized under, the United States; on the ground of repugnance to the constitution, etc.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Almost every mechanism Collier's described in 1921 has been dismantled. The writ of error, which the entry carefully distinguishes from an appeal, was abolished in federal practice in 1928, and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure of 1938 merged law and equity into a single "notice of appeal"; the old federal circuit courts the entry refers to had in fact already been abolished in 1911, their appellate work passing to the circuit courts of appeals created in 1891. The $5,000 threshold and the two-year window are long gone: a federal civil appeal must now generally be filed within 30 days (60 when the United States is a party), with no minimum sum in dispute. The Supreme Court's remaining mandatory appeals were largely eliminated in 1988, so review there is now almost entirely discretionary, by writ of certiorari. What survives is the underlying distinction the entry drew: appellate courts still review questions of law freely but disturb a trial court's findings of fact only rarely.
Written for this edition, 2026.