What is a Lower Court?

@Izzy78 - I agree. I always think it is interesting to read and learn about how other countries do things. Unfortunately, a lot, if not all, of the classes Americans take in school completely ignore how the governments of other countries function. I think if more politicians started looking at how other countries have solved their problems, there might be more ideas being thrown around that would be effective.

As far as the foreign court systems go, I am even less familiar with them. I would assume most places settled by Europeans would have a system similar to ours with different tiers and cases starting at the bottom and going up.

I would definitely be interested to hear how Middle Eastern and East Asian countries handle their court cases if anyone has any knowledge of this.

The thing I have always thought most interesting about the court system in the United States is that the federal courts lower than the Supreme Court are established by the fact that the Supreme Court can't handle all the cases. The Constitution actually says very little about how the court system should be set up. All it really considers is that there should be a Chief Justice and that courts can be established as needed.

Since the Constitution doesn't say much about the courts, most of the customs were borrowed from the British courts. There are still a lot of unique things that other countries' courts don't do, though.

@Emilski - The names of the courts can be very confusing, especially if you move from one state to another. In my old state, like yours, the lowest courts were called circuit courts. In my new state, they are called district courts. This is made all the more confusing considering the federal system. The lower courts of the judicial branch of the federal governmental are called district courts followed by circuit courts of appeals and then the U.S. Supreme Court.

The court that someone is tried by depends on the crime. If someone breaks a state or local law such as speeding or various assault situations, they would go to a state trial. If someone breaks a federal law like ignoring the Clean Air Act or any other Act passed by Congress, that case would start out in the U.S. District Court.

I guess I have never really thought a lot about the U.S. court system, but there really are a lot of different levels that have to be dealt with. At first glance it seems like there are almost too many courts, but then again, I am always hearing stories about the courts being too full with cases.

I suppose the one question I have now that I am thinking about this is how do the state and federal courts work together? That is something I always kind of wondered. If I remember correctly from my high school civics class so many years ago, my state has three levels of the court. There are the circuit courts, appeals courts, and the state Supreme Court. I don't know a lot of people who have ever had to go to court, but they've always just gone to the local courthouse for the county. I would assume that is the circuit court. How do people end up going to federal court, then?