Australian architect Thomas Rowe designed Aliʻiōlani Hale in the Italian Renaissance Revival style, envisioning it as a palace fit for a Hawaiian king. But Kamehameha V, surveying his government's cramped and scattered offices, made a practical decision: his kingdom needed a functioning bureaucracy more than it needed another grand residence. The building was dedicated in 1874 by King David Kalākaua, one of Kamehameha V's successors, since the king who started it all never lived to see the project completed. Hawaiian newspapers of the day criticized the extravagant design, arguing that the building should have been converted into the palace it was originally drawn up to be. For nearly two decades, Aliʻiōlani Hale held the executive departments, the legislature, and the courts of the Hawaiian Kingdom — the entire machinery of an independent nation, compressed under one ornate roof.

On January 17, 1893, the Committee of Safety gathered at Aliʻiōlani Hale. Under the leadership of Lorrin A. Thurston, they read aloud a proclamation deposing Queen Liliʻuokalani, ending the Hawaiian monarchy by public decree from the steps of a building that was supposed to serve that very monarchy. The irony is difficult to overstate. After the establishment of the provisional government and then the Republic of Hawaiʻi in 1894, offices began migrating across the street to ʻIolani Palace, and Aliʻiōlani Hale settled into its quieter identity as a judicial building. The throne room where Hawaiian kings once held court gave way to courtrooms where American territorial law would be argued and applied.

When Hawaiʻi became a U.S. territory in 1900, the building's space problems only worsened. By 1911, the entire interior had been gutted and rebuilt with a new floor plan better suited to its judicial purpose — the old palace layout, with its grand ceremonial rooms, had never worked well for offices and courtrooms. In the 1940s, a new wing was added, its architects laboring to blend modern construction with the 1870s original. Over the following decades, most state courts relocated to newer buildings around Honolulu, leaving Aliʻiōlani Hale to the Hawaiʻi State Supreme Court, which still occupies it today. The building also houses the state's largest law library and the King Kamehameha V Judiciary History Center, where visitors can walk through a restored nineteenth-century courtroom and trace the evolution of Hawaiian law from the kapu system through the kingdom's constitution to statehood.

In December 2005, a team led by Professor Larry Connors of the University of Denver used ground-penetrating radar to locate a time capsule buried by Kamehameha V when he laid the building's cornerstone in 1872. The capsule contained photographs of royal families, the constitution of the Hawaiian Kingdom, postage stamps, Hawaiian and foreign coins, newspapers, a calendar, and books — a snapshot of an independent Pacific nation that no longer exists in the form its king intended. The capsule was not retrieved; engineers feared that excavating it might damage the building's foundation. It remains underground, a sealed message from a king to a future he could not have predicted, waiting beneath the feet of Supreme Court justices who serve a very different sovereign.

For most visitors, Aliʻiōlani Hale is inseparable from the gold-leaf statue of Kamehameha the Great that stands in its courtyard. The statue is one of the most photographed landmarks in Hawaiʻi, draped in long lei during Kamehameha Day celebrations each June. Television viewers may also recognize the building's facade from the CBS series Hawaii Five-0, where it doubled as ʻIolani Palace, serving as the fictional headquarters of the Five-0 task force. The real Aliʻiōlani Hale sits within walking distance of the State Capitol, ʻIolani Palace, Kawaiahaʻo Church, and Washington Place — a cluster of landmarks that together tell the story of Hawaiʻi's transformation from Polynesian kingdom to American state, compressed into a few city blocks of downtown Honolulu.