United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, cited in case reports as 5th Cir., is one of the thirteen United States courts of appeals. It hears appeals from the federal district courts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, and has seventeen active judgeships. The court is headquartered at the John Minor Wisdom United States Court of Appeals Building in New Orleans, Louisiana. It was created by the Evarts Act on June 16, 1891, and at first covered Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. In 1981 the districts of Alabama, Georgia and Florida were moved to the newly created Eleventh Circuit, and in 1982 it lost jurisdiction over the Panama Canal Zone, which had been added in 1948. From the late 1950s the judges Elbert Parr Tuttle, John Minor Wisdom, John R. Brown and Richard T. Rives, known as the Fifth Circuit Four, issued decisions that advanced the civil rights of African Americans, and the court was then nicknamed the Supreme Court of Dixie.