Federal Court System

12 Key excerpts on "Federal Court System"

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  Criminal Procedure

  Law and Practice

  • Rolando del Carmen, , Craig Hemmens, , Rolando del Carmen, Craig Hemmens(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  The Court System, Sources of Rights, and Fundamental Principles 3 The Federal Court System Article III, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution provides that The judicial Power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behavior, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their continuance in office. The highest court in the Federal Court System is the U.S. Supreme Court (see Figure 1.1). ( Note: Whenever the word Court is used with a capital C in this text, the reference is to the U.S. Supreme Court. The word court with a lowercase c refers to all other courts on the federal or state level.) It is composed of a chief justice and eight associate justices, all of whom are nominated and appointed by the president of the United States with the advice and consent of the Senate (see Figure 1.2). A federal law passed in 1869 fixed the number of U.S. Supreme Court justices at nine, but this number can be changed by law. Supreme Court justices enjoy life tenure and may be removed only by impeachment, which very rarely occurs. The Supreme Court of the United States Appeals from state courts in 50 states, from the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico, and from the District of Columbia Court of Appeals U.S. Tax Court and various administrative agencies U.S. District Courts with federal and local jurisdiction U.S. District Courts with federal jurisdiction only U.S. Claims Courts U.S. Court of International Trade Administrative agencies Merit Systems Board, Board of Contract Appeals, Patent/ Trademark Boards, International Trade Commission, etc. Federal Trade Commission, National Labor Relations Board, Immi-gration and Naturalization Service, etc.

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  The Handy American Government Answer Book

  How Washington, Politics and Elections Work

  • Gina Misiroglu(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Visible Ink Press

    (Publisher)

  THE COURTS THE Federal Court System How and when was the Federal Court System established?

  During the period of the Articles of Confederation, from 1781 to 1789, the laws of the United States were not subject to a national court system or judiciary. Rather, they were interpreted haphazardly by the individual states, which often ignored interstate disputes or settled them unfairly. When the Founding Fathers shaped the Constitution, they followed the words of Alexander Hamilton, who maintained that “laws are dead letters without courts to expound and define their true meaning and operation.” The articles and clauses they wrote were developed to meet the need for an arbiter (reviewer) of law with a national jurisdiction. Thus, Article III provides for one Supreme Court and such inferior courts as Congress may “ordain and establish.” Additionally, Article I, Section 8 states that Congress has the power “to constitute tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court.” The Judiciary Act of 1789 formally established the Supreme Court and Federal Court System.

  What role does Congress play with respect to the federal courts?

  The Constitution gives Congress the power to create federal courts other than the Supreme Court and to determine their jurisdiction, or area of authority and control. In addition, Congress controls the types of cases that are addressed in the federal courts. As part of the system of checks and balances, Congress has three other basic responsibilities that determine how the courts operate. First, it decides how many judges there should be and where they will serve. Second, through the confirmation process, Congress determines which of the president’s judicial nominees ultimately become federal judges. Third, Congress approves the federal courts’ budget and grants money for the judiciary to operate—an amount that constitutes less than 1 percent of the federal budget.

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  Judicial Politics in the United States

  • Mark C. Miller(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This chapter will now turn to the differences between the state and Federal Court Systems. Recall that there are really fifty-one different state court systems, but for convenience this section will compare the Federal Court System with a generic state court system. Every state has both a Federal Court System and a state court system within its borders, with overlapping jurisdictions. We have both state and Federal Court Systems in our country because state courts existed well before the U.S. Constitution of 1789 called for the creation of the Federal Court System. In many ways, the federal courts were superimposed upon the existing state court structures. The organization and structure of the court systems in the United States are extremely complicated in part because of our unique system of federalism. Most other federalist governments around the world have chosen to have one unified court system, like the one in Canada, instead of having two separate court systems, as we have in the United States.

  At this point, a general definition of federalism would be helpful. To understand federalism, we must compare it with other approaches used around the world. There are three basic choices about how to structure the relationship between the national government and regional governments: unitary, federal, and confederal. Federalism is the division of power between the national government and the regional governments (in the United States, these are the states). In a federal system, the national government is supreme over the regional governments, although the regional governments retain certain powers. Article VI of the U.S. Constitution contains a Supremacy Clause, which, when read in conjunction with the Fourteenth Amendment, clearly indicates that we have a federal system in which the states are legally inferior to the national government. The British Empire at the time of the American Revolution was a unitary system, where all power was centralized in the national government in London. Confederal systems mean that there is a division of power between the national government and the regional governments, with the regional governments being supreme. Confederal systems will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter. The U.S. Constitution and various federal statutes spell out the structure of the Federal Court System, while the state constitutions and state statutes generally establish the structure of the state courts.

  The Articles of Confederation

  The existing state court systems were first created in colonial times. Because the original thirteen states were founded as British colonies, the colonists brought the English common law notions of law and courts with them. Each colony set up its own court system with its own rules and procedures. After the American Revolution, the state court systems remained much as they had been prior to independence.

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  Contemporary American Federalism

  The Growth of National Power, Second Edition

  • Joseph F. Zimmerman(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 5 Federalism and the Judiciary L aws and courts are essential to the existence of organized society. Through a well-developed legal system the rights, privileges, and duties of individuals are established and controversies are settled authoritatively. The United States is distinguished by a dual judicial system—one national and one state. The state courts constitute an independent judicial system and are in no way dependent on the Federal Court System. Whether there was a need for a national court system was a subject of debate at the 1789 Philadelphia constitutional convention. THE NATIONAL JUDICIARY There were only state courts under the Articles of Confederation and Per- petual Union. Experience with total reliance on state courts during the con- federacy convinced delegates to the constitutional convention there must be a national judiciary since disputes between states would become more common in the future and an impartial judicial forum would be essential. Furthermore, suits between citizens of different states also would become more frequent and experience revealed a tendency for state courts to favor citizens of their state. The strongest argument for a national judiciary was the need for an impartial tribunal to resolve disputes over the meaning of the various pro- visions of the proposed constitution and statutes enacted by Congress. Legal chaos would result if the adjudication were the responsibility of the courts of the various states, which might issue different decisions on the same pro- vision, whereby a constitutional or statutory provision would have a given meaning in one state and a different meaning in a sister state. 83 Alexander Hamilton justified the need for a national judiciary in The Federalist Number 80: “If there are such things as political axioms, the pro- priety of the judicial power of a government being coextensive with its leg- islative may be ranked among the number.

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  Construction Law

  An Introduction for Engineers, Architects, and Contractors

  • Gail Kelley(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • RSMeans

    (Publisher)

  Only federal courts have the power to interpret the U.S. Constitution, fed- eral laws, and federal agency regulations. Federal courts also have the power to review federal agency actions and determine the constitutionality of both fed- eral and state laws. State courts have the power to interpret the state constitu- tion, state laws, and state agency regulations. 1.3.1 Structure of the Court Systems Both the state and Federal Court Systems are multi-tiered. Cases are initially brought in a trial court; the trial can be either a jury or a bench (nonjury) trial. In a bench trial, the presiding judge delivers the verdict; in a jury trial, the jury delivers the verdict. Either party can appeal any part of the verdict to a first-level appeals court. In the federal system and the majority of the states, the ruling in the first-level appeals court can be appealed to a second-level appeals court. Courts of appeals do not use juries or witnesses, and no new evidence is submit- ted; appellate courts base their decisions on a review of lower-court records. 1.3.2 Federal Trial and Appeals Courts In the federal system, most of the trial courts are district courts. Each state has at least one federal district case; more populous states can have three or four. In addition to the district courts, there is the Court of Federal Claims, a trial court that hears claims against the U.S. government. The district courts have concurrent jurisdiction with the Court of Federal Claims for claims under $10,000. When the claim involves a contract with a government agency, the Court of Federal Claims has concurrent jurisdiction with the applicable Board of Contract Appeals. Federal district courts are bound by legal precedents established by the decisions of the Supreme Court and the court of appeals for their respective circuit.

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  GOVT

  • Edward Sidlow, Beth Henschen, Edward Sidlow(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 320 Part Four: Institutions fifty states has its own court system, as does the District of Columbia. No two state court systems are exactly the same. In general, though, the states have different lev- els, or tiers, of courts, just as the federal system does. Normally, state courts deal with questions of state law, and the decisions of a state’s highest court on mat- ters of state law are normally final. If a federal question is involved, however, a decision of a state supreme court may be appealed to the Federal Court System. We will discuss the Federal Court System in the pages that follow. U.S. District and Specialized Courts On the lowest tier of the Federal Court System are the U.S. district courts, or federal trial courts—the courts in which cases involving federal laws begin. The cases in these courts are decided by a judge or a jury. There is at least one federal district court in every state, and there is one in the District of Columbia. The number of judi- cial districts has varied historically, but no new district has been created since 1966. Figure 14.2 shows their geographic boundaries. Currently, there are 94 judicial districts and 677 district court judgeships. The number of judges per district varies from two in North Dakota to twenty-eight both in the Southern District of New York and the Central District of California. The federal system also includes other trial courts, such as the Court of International Trade and others listed in Figure 14.1. These courts have limited, or The requirement of standing to sue limits the issues that can be decided by the courts. Fur- thermore, both state and federal governments can specify by law when an individual or group has standing to sue. For example, the federal government will not allow a taxpayer to sue the Department of Defense for spending tax dollars wastefully.

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  The Judicial Branch of Federal Government

  People, Process, and Politics

  • Charles L. Zelden(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  In accounting for this interplay of the federal courts and politics, it is impor- tant to recall that the U.S. Supreme Court in particular, but also the lower federal judiciary by implication, are not just courts of law. If the federal courts only served the purpose of resolving technical questions of law for the legal community, their rulings would not be controversial. Instead, the federal courts serve as the third branch of the federal government and as such are necessarily and inevitably involved in the issues of the day. True, the courts are passive in the sense that they must wait for cases, disputes, and litigations to come to them; yet over the years, Americans have turned more and more to the federal courts to both resolve conflict and estab- lish public policy. The courts, in turn, have responded with rulings large and small. In this fashion, then, the federal courts are political actors in the ongoing poli- tics of any particular era. In particular, the U.S. Supreme Court has assumed the role of the definitive and last word on the law’s meaning and thus on the legality and constitutionality of government 124 THE POLITICS OF THE COURTS Considered one of the greatest American jurists, Benjamin Cardozo is remembered for his landmark decisions on negligence and his modesty, philosophy, and writing style. In particular, Cardozo is known for opinions that stressed the necessity for the law to adapt to the realities and needs of modern life. (Harris & Ewing, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States) policies. Consequently, it plays an espe- cially important role in national policy- making. Some scholars, in fact, have ar- gued that—because of the power of the Supreme Court to settle the issue of con- stitutionality and because the federal court judges are appointed for life terms—at the start of the twentieth-first century the United States is actually governed by these unelected and unac- countable jurists.

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  Polyphonic Federalism

  Toward the Protection of Fundamental Rights

  • Robert A. Schapiro(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  Exercises of jurisdiction that seem aberrant from a dualist point of view turn out to be principled and beneficial when viewed from a polyphonic perspective. Polyphonic federalism points the way to an important use of courts to implement rights. The redundancy of state and Federal Court Systems pro-vides a significant advantage of judicial federalism in the United States. 4 If one system fails in its promise to protect rights, the other remains ready to intervene. Intersystemic adjudication, in which a court defined by one po-litical system implements the laws of another system, represents the flower-ing of polyphonic federalism in the judicial realm. This chapter illustrates how intersystemic adjudication could fulfill the promise of polyphony. Unlike most other federalist polities, the United States maintains a fully de-veloped dual court system, with federal trial and appellate courts and state trial and appellate benches in every state. 5 Most other federalist systems em-ploy a single set of lower courts, generally identified with the subnational units, which hear cases raising issues of national or subnational law. 6 Given the dual judicial system in the United States, cases must be allocated among state and federal courts. This distributional decision involves an important question of federalism, how power should be assigned among states and the national government. The different structural features of state and fed-eral courts in the United States magnify the importance of the choice. The electoral accountability of most state judges, in contrast to federal judges, The Benefits of Intersystemic Adjudication / 123 may give the state and federal courts different perspectives on issues, par-ticularly those relating to hotly contested matters of public policy. 7 The existence of a dual court system creates the possibility of allocating cases based on the law at issue.

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  Why Politics Matters

  An Introduction to Political Science

  • Kevin Dooley, Joseph Patten, Kevin Dooley(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  The structure of the modern Federal Court System is quite straightforward. It consists of a three-tiered system that includes (1) ninety-four district courts, (2) twelve regional courts of appeal and one Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and (3) one U.S. Supreme Court. Most federal cases originate at the district court level. Each state has at least one dis- trict court and some larger states, such as California, Texas, and New York, have four district courts. These courts primarily hear cases that involve disputes over federal laws, issues emanating from the U.S. Constitution, or diversity of citizenship cases, where a resident of one state files suit against a resident of another on an issue worth more than $75,000. Rules granting federal jurisdiction over diversity of citi- zenship cases took shape during the Constitutional Convention, when most resi- dents felt greater loyalty to their respective states than to the federal government. We provide a visual representation of the federal court structure and highlight the number of federal case filings in Figure 8.1 and Table 8.1. In Table 8.2 we highlight the difference between federal and state court systems in the United States. Courts at the federal level are divided according to whether they are courts of original jurisdiction or courts of appellate jurisdiction. District courts serve as courts of original jurisdiction because this is where legal disputes are first heard. It is here where determinations of guilt or innocence are made, and it is in these courts that legal disputes of a civil nature are decided on the merits. There are currently twelve regional federal courts of appeals and one Court of Appeals for the Federal Cir- cuit, whose primary purpose is to review decisions made at the district court level.

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  American Government

  Conflict, Compromise, And Citizenship

  • Christopher J Bosso, John Portz, Michael Tolley(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Each state has its own court system, which operates separately and independent of the national government’s court system as well as those of other states. As a result, legal rules set by state courts are likely to vary from one state to another. Sometimes the differences are trivial, but sometimes they are quite dramatic. For example, some state courts have recognized the “right to die” by allowing the use of “living wills,” but others have not. 2 However, as a result of the “fall faith and credit” clause of Article IV of the Constitution (discussed in chapter 3), the decisions made by a court in one state must be respected by the courts in other states. The reason is simple: to prevent the relitigation of issues already settled in one state. For example, a divorce settlement reached in court in one state cannot be challenged or reopened in court in another state. But this principle does not mean that the development of a law or legal doctrine in one state is automatically binding on all others. As we will discuss later, state laws or state court decisions can be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court if they potentially violate a provision in the U.S. Constitution. State and federal judicial systems may be separate and independent, but they have several points of contact, and through the years they have established informal traditions of interaction. The federal and state court systems are connected at the top and bottom of the judicial hierarchies. The links at the top result from the power of the U.S. Supreme Court, the highest federal court, to review decisions of the highest state courts that involve the U.S. Constitution or acts of Congress. The links at the bottom are governed by federal statutes, particularly the Habeas Corpus Act of 1867, as amended in 1996. 3 This statute protects prisoners who believe that they were wrongfully convicted in the state trial courts by allowing them to ask a federal judge in one of the U.S

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  The Role of Circuit Courts in the Formation of United States Law in the Early Republic

  Following Supreme Court Justices Washington, Livingston, Story and Thompson

  • David Lynch(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Hart Publishing

    (Publisher)

  1 LaCroix supports the view that the Marshall Court regarded the inferior federal courts as a crucial locus of federal power because the justices came face to face with the citizen on circuit and delivered charges to grand and petit juries in which, because of their political allegiances, they were able to ‘place the interests of the Union above those of the states’. A LaCroix, ‘Federalists, Federalism, and Federal Jurisdiction’ (2012) 30 Law and History Review 205 at 210. 2 The Federal Circuit Courts: Shaping Local and National Justice for an Emerging Republic This chapter examines the challenges faced by the justices in their efforts to establish a Federal Court System, the sources from which they fashioned federal law, and their efforts to achieve uniformity of decision making across the Union. Those responsible for establishing the legal system of any new nation will, of necessity, consider foreign models and adopt such principles of law which best fit their needs. The chapter explains how the justices used federal statutes, Supreme Court opin-ions, state and English law to establish a system of law acceptable to the majority and to fulfil the dual judicial and political role entrusted to them by Congress. Their first task was to administer law and procedure consistently across the cir-cuits and resolve local litigation. They were also expected to convince the nation that stability and prosperity lay in strong national government underpinned by a system of federal law. 1 Both undertakings were set against a background of wide-spread fears that a strong federal system of government and judiciary might lead to an oppressive regime similar to that faced by the people under British rule. This chapter examines how the justices faced determined opposition to any diminution of states’ sovereignty, their shaping of United States law on circuit and the ways in which they sought to convince the public of a need for strong central government and a system of federal law.

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  Brandeis and the Progressive Constitution

  • Kristin L. Hoganson(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  Federal law had grown in scope and complexity, and the federal courts had de-veloped considerable expertness in its interpretation and application. 109 Addi-tionally, the structure and organization of the federal judicial system promised a greater uniformity in the development of national law than state courts could achieve. 110 Finally, the Study maintained, lack of sympathy—or even hostility toward federal law on the part of state courts could frustrate the actual vindi-cation of federal rights beyond the institutional capacity of the Supreme Court to review and rectify. The institute adopted the central proposition that the federal district courts were not only forums for interpreting federal law but also, and more im-portant, the practical vindicators of federal rights. Owing to the critical task of fact finding, their jurisdiction should extend beyond technical federal questions to include all claims based on federal law, even when the only disputed issues were factual. 111 Moreover, if federal courts sat to vindicate federal rights, they should also have jurisdiction over cases where defendants raised federal counter-claims or defenses. 112 Their jurisdiction, the Study announced, should extend to all cases in which the meaning or application of the Constitution, laws, or treaties of the United States, is a principal element in the position of either party. m Consequently, the Study called for the severe restriction of the well-pleaded complaint rule and a far-reaching expansion of federal question jurisdiction. Its vibrant vindication theory was not now the law, it acknowledged. It is [nevertheless] the rationale on which the present proposals are based. 4 The ALI Study set forth a series of interrelated recommendations. First, it adopted several restrictions that would likely reduce diversity actions by at least 50 percent.

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