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gerrymander (1:144–45, 460; 2:708).

      The widely held opinion at the convention that the General Assembly’s authority needed to be curtailed did not lead to a significant transfer of power to the executive branch of government. Most notably, the delegates refused to confer the veto power upon the governor. Ranney could not deny that the General Assembly passed too many laws and often acted with undue haste. But the remedy, he thought, lay in reducing the legislature’s power, not in giving more power to the governor (1:112).

      Ranney also opposed what he considered an undue expansion of the governor’s patronage power. The selection of public officers by the General Assembly had been fraught with unpalatable wheeling and dealing. Ranney believed that the legislature’s “power to confer office” had done much “to discredit legislative bodies” and was a major source of “hasty and inconsiderate legislation” (1:112). Many delegates shared Ranney’s view. As a result the convention took from the General Assembly and gave to the electorate the power to elect judges, the secretary of state, and the state auditor and treasurer. Ranney successfully fought an attempt to increase the terms of state executive officers, other than the auditor, beyond two years (1:325, 330–31; 2:290).

      Notwithstanding the trend toward popular election of public officials, the delegates disagreed over the method of selecting lesser officials, such as the directors of the state penitentiary and trustees of the deaf and dumb asylum and other state benevolent institutions. Some thought that the election of lower-level administrative officers was too burdensome a responsibility for the voters (1:365, 540). Ranney believed otherwise, at least regarding the penitentiary. The management of the state prison, he asserted, was no mere ministerial function but one of the most important jobs in the state. The directors had in their hands the lives of hundreds of individuals, the safety of the public, and great patronage and pecuniary interests (by which Ranney probably meant the hiring of employees and awarding of contracts). Rather than subject such vital offices to party influences, Ranney wanted to have the directors of the penitentiary, and of any future state prisons, elected directly by the people (2:342, 1:541). The convention yielded to the extent of giving the legislature the authority to determine the method of selecting the directors of the penitentiary; the trustees of all other state institutions would be appointed by the governor, with the advice and consent of the Senate (2:340–43).²

      Ranney’s most notable, although largely unsuccessful, work at the convention involved the reformation of Ohio’s third branch of government, the judiciary. A bipartisan consensus on the need to revise the constitutional article on the judiciary overshadowed all other reasons for holding a convention. The constitution of 1802 provided for a supreme court, courts of common pleas, and justices of the peace, but for the most part it left the jurisdiction of the courts, judicial salaries, the establishment of common pleas circuits, and other court-related matters to the General Assembly. At its first session in 1803 the General Assembly gave the supreme court exclusive jurisdiction over cases involving divorce, alimony, and capital offenses, concurrent jurisdiction with the courts of common pleas over other major offenses, original jurisdiction in important civil cases, and the power to hear appeals from the courts of common pleas where the title to land was in question or where the amount in controversy exceeded one hundred dollars. The legislature soon expanded the supreme court’s appellate jurisdiction to cover all cases that originated in the courts of common pleas, possibly because the panel of common pleas judges that heard a case did not necessarily include a lawyer. This expansion of appellate jurisdiction imposed a heavy burden because in those days an appeal often meant a new jury trial in the supreme court. The common pleas courts had jurisdiction over all civil and noncapital criminal cases that were not relegated to justices of the peace, including probate and guardianship matters. Justices of the peace heard small civil and criminal cases.³

      Constitutional limitations on the legislature’s power to regulate the structure of the court system posed serious problems for the lawmakers. The constitution specified an initial supreme court of three judges—a fourth could be added after five years—and required it to hold a session in every county every year. The court simply could not keep up with the demands of a rapidly growing state and a legislative propensity to create counties willy-nilly. In 1808 the General Assembly added a fourth judge and, as permitted by the constitution, divided the state into two districts. In each district two judges would hold sessions at the county seats. If the judges in a district disagreed on a question of law, or if they wanted the full court to consider a novel or particularly difficult legal issue, they could postpone the case. To hear postponed cases, at least three judges had to hold an extraordinary session in each district annually.⁴

      The innovations did not relieve the weary judges. Moreover, the split court presented other problems. A disagreement between the two judges in a district led to a postponement and a new hearing at which one or both of the same judges would sit. Furthermore, there were in effect two supreme courts which could produce different bodies of law for the two districts. In 1810 the General Assembly restored the supreme court to its original form. In the ensuing years the lawmakers again added a fourth judge, allowing the judges effectively to reinstate the two-district solution (because two judges made up a constitutional quorum), and required annual sessions of the court in bank (as a whole) to resolve conflicts and difficult questions of law. Nothing seemed to help. According to Judge John C. Wright, in 1834 the supreme court had 1,459 cases on its trial docket. To hear these cases the judges had to travel 2,250 miles through seventy-two counties. After deducting travel time, Sundays, and the month required for the court’s meeting in bank, Wright calculated that the judges had to decide seven cases per day, every day, for the rest of the year to keep up with the caseload.⁵

      The common pleas courts also came in for criticism. As required by the constitution, the General Assembly initially divided the state into three common pleas circuits, each headed by a president judge. A court of common pleas, with two or three associate judges, sat in every county. The lawmakers added common pleas circuits until by 1851 there were twenty, but the courts still wallowed in a mass of business. The associate judges, often laymen with little legal experience, did not much ease the burden of the president, even though they could form a quorum without him. The presence of lay judges poorly versed in the law brought numerous complaints.⁶

      Legislative “fixes”—the creation of several trial courts known as superior courts, abolition of the supreme court’s original jurisdiction in civil actions at law and in the trial of capital crimes, and elimination of the right of appeal to the supreme court—failed to satisfy anyone.⁷ When the constitutional convention opened, the courts remained mired in a bottomless bog of cases.

      The president of the convention appointed Ranney to the committee on the judicial department, a thirteen-member body that included some of Ohio’s most prominent lawyers and politicians (1:64). Records of the work of the convention’s committees have not been preserved, but the published report of the convention debates suggest that the work of the judiciary committee did not always proceed harmoniously. On the question of whether district courts should meet in every county or only at two or three locations within a district, for example, the committee split 7–6, so that members had to “yield their own extreme views” to reach a compromise. However, Ranney never gave in on this point. Indeed, he refused to go along with the majority report as a whole. Henry Stanbery defended the majority report as “the result of long and arduous labor—of much discussion—of examination and comparison of a multitude of plans” that had “united the opinions of more than three-fourths of all the members of the committee, composed of gentlemen who have been for a long time in the practice of the law.” But Ranney submitted a minority report on behalf of himself and perhaps Samuel J. Kirkwood and Samuel Humphreville, two other Democrats who refused to sign the majority report (1:430–31, 592–93, 551).

      Ranney ruffled his fellows’ feathers when he moved to amend the majority report to require each district court to meet in every county in the district. Joseph Swan argued that the majority plan would produce a more respectable bar. “[I]nstead of being insulated, as now, to each county,” he maintained, lawyers would get together in large numbers at the sessions of the district court. The bumpkins would be exposed to more learned and intelligent lawyers, and the court, which “seldom rises above the bar in learning and legal attainment,” would benefit

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