Ex Parte State Insurance Company

Mr. Justice MILLER delivered the opinion of the court. Much argument is addressed to us on the construction of the act of March 3d, 1873, concerning the District and Cir- *420 cult Courts of Alabama, especially whether by that act the Circuit Court sitting at Mobile has circuit court jurisdiction over the whole State or not. In the view we take of the present case it is not necessary for us to decide that question. Prior to that time the District Court of the United States for the Middle District of Alabama was a court invested with circuit court powers. Among those powers, in our opinion, was that of receiving and exercising jurisdiction over cases removed from the State courts within its territorial limits. ■The case before’us whs of that class. No question is raised that the requirements of the law for the rémoval were complied with. The order for the removal was made on the 11th day of January, 1873, and the papers filed in the office of the clerk of the Circuit Court for the Southern District on the 18th day of the same month. The.order of the State court was that “tbis¡ cause be removed out of this court, tinto the'Circuit Court of the United States at Mobile, Alabama, that beiu’g th,e Circuit Court of the United States for this district.” The county of Barbour, in which the State court sat and made this order, was in the Middle District of Alabama, and as, in our judgment, the case,-if to be removed at all, should have been removed-to the District Court for that district, to be disposed of in the exercise of its circuit court powers, we think the order of the State court was void. That it conferred.no jurisdiction of the case on the Circuit Court for the Southern District of Alabama, because it could take none as the law then stood. Whatever may be the effect of the subsequent act of March 3d, 1873, on the jurisdiction of all these courts, there-is nothing in it which removes the difficulty in the present case. The Circuit Court at Mobile was, therefore, x’ight in refusing to hear the case, and ordeiing it to be stricken from the docket, and the mandamus now asked for is Denied.