In the 1790s and early 1800s, most of the criminal prosecutions in the federal courts were for crimes specified by congressional statutes, such as the Crimes Act of 1790. But district attorneys also sought indictments for crimes defined under the common law—crimes defined not by statutes but by case law going back to English courts. Many district judges and Supreme Court justices sitting in circuit courts assumed that the courts had jurisdiction over common-law crimes, such as bribery of federal officers, based on the federal government’s inherent power under the law of nations. Justice Samuel Chase, however, sitting as circuit justice in the 1798 case of United States v. Worrall, denied that the federal courts had jurisdiction over common-law crimes. The question was finally resolved by the Supreme Court in the 1812 case of United States v. Hudson and Goodwin, when the Court ruled that the federal courts did not possess jurisdiction over crimes defined solely by the common law. Congress passed new statutes throughout the nineteenth century adding to and more precisely defining particular federal crimes.

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