Courts and Law

THE COURTS AND THE LAW together are integral parts of a complex system that regulates the lives of all people in a structured and organized society. Laws may be natural, which means that they are an inherent part [Page 607]of human nature. Natural laws are the foundation upon which acceptable human behavior in a society is based. Man-made laws, the jurisprudence of a society, encompass all the rules, regulations, and procedures that are written down, and they may certainly be derived from natural law. Jurisprudence also includes the history of legal decisions and precedents that structure subsequent legal decisions.

The court system is a component part of the legal system. Simply put, legislators write the laws, bureaucrats implement laws, the police enforce the laws, and the courts interpret the laws. All of these components of the legal system need to work in concert; of course, with so many different roles and multiple actors involved, this is a system that necessarily leads to disagreement, misinterpretation, and confusion. However, this is also a system that permits the members of society who are bound by the laws to have many avenues of input into the system. Also, changes in society's attitudes and new ideas can be introduced into this complicated, fragmented, and flexible system.

The United States is a federal system, which means that there is both a national government and a series of state governments. This further means that each level of government makes laws within its area of jurisdiction, and there necessarily needs to be a court system at each level to interpret these laws and deal with any conflicts that might arise. So in the United States, there are, in effect, two court systems, a national court system (called the federal court system) and a state court system. But it gets a bit more complicated, because each state may determine its own court structure, so there is variation among the state systems. Also, there is interaction between the court systems.

STATE COURT SYSTEM

Each state decides the structure of its courts as well as the method of judicial appointment. The court system is hierarchical: there are lower courts (referred to as minor trial courts), where cases originate, and then a case may be appealed to a higher court (first, a major trial court, then sometimes also an intermediate appellate court, and finally the state's highest court). The grounds for appeal also vary by state and according to the crimes or issues involved in the case. In some states, the highest court is called the court of appeal; in other states, there is a state supreme court. Ultimately, a case may be appealed to the country's highest court, the U.S. Supreme Court, but only if the case meets the requirement for appeal to the Supreme Court, that is, if the case involves claims arising under federal law, which includes the Constitution.

Although there are five primary methods of judicial selection, each state has its own unique variation, and sometimes a state uses different selection methods for different levels of state court. It has been stated that there is perhaps no other office in the United States that offers such diversity in selection. Virginia is the only state that currently uses legislative appointment, whereby the state legislature has the sole appointment power. This used to be more widely used, but now executive appointment is a more common variant, whereby the state governor has sole appointment power. Some states require that the governor's appointment be confirmed by the legislature. The most common method requires that a judicial hopeful be elected. The election may be partisan or nonpartisan. In a partisan election, the judicial candidate usually runs in a party primary to gain nomination and then runs again in a general election where his or her party affiliation is listed on the ballot. In a nonpartisan election, there would be no party primary and the ballot at the general election would not have any party affiliation listed.

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