The Pennsylvania General Assembly created it during the American Revolution to take the place of the British Appeals Committee of the Privy Council.

[I]t is requisite that the good people of this commonwealth, who have adopted the common law of England, should enjoy the full benefit thereof by the erection of a competent jurisdiction within this state for the hearing, determining and judging in the last instance upon complaints of error at common law; and also .

Then as now, a committee of the Privy Council heard cases from certain overseas jurisdictions under the rule of the British crown.

[1] One legal effect of American Independence, however, was permanently ending the flow of cases to London from the newly-independent United States.

A judicial void was left by the disappearance of the Privy Council as the final tribunal for the Commonwealth.

The establishing statute recited, "the good people of this commonwealth, by their happy deliverance from their late dependent condition [on Britain], and by becoming free and sovereign are released from this badge of slavery and have acquired the transcendent benefit of having justice administered to them at home and at moderate cost and charges.

[4] "A writ of error ordered judges to send the record of their proceedings in a particular case to a superior court for inspection.

[4] Despite the difficulties of travel for almost 300 miles and across the Allegheny Mountains from the western part of Pennsylvania, the 1780 Act directed that the High Court was to sit only in Philadelphia, in the far southeastern corner of the Commonwealth.

Until its 1791 reorganization, the High Court's members included both non-lawyers such as Benjamin Franklin, and noted lawyers as Joseph Reed, and John Dickinson.

The General Assembly necessarily needed to change the composition of the High Court to comply with the new constitution's prescribed separation of powers.

Records of the High Court are held at the Pennsylvania State Archives in the capital city, Harrisburg.