The Structure of the American Legal System - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages The rules set by sovereign governments benefit from various measures of legitimacy on most occasions. Civil Law is the legislative codes, laws, or set of rules that are enacted through authorized lawmaking bodies like Congress, state as well as local legislatures, or any executive authority entrusted with the power to make laws. Common Law refers to judge-made law handed down through judicial opinions, which come up with slowly developing standards over time. The modern U.S. legal system is characterized by these two forms. Despite the common law holding sway for most of the nation’s history, legislatures in all fifty states and Congress during the past century have replaced many traditional common law rules with detailed legislative codes.

2.0 THE STRUCTURE OF THE AMERICAN LEGAL SYSTEM
Every court holds a unique position within the larger hierarchy of state and federal courts. Consequently, every court carries out several particular roles dictated by where it happens to be located in the superior court organization.

2.1 State Legal Systems and State Courts
In the United States, most criminal, as well as civil law issues, are first handled in one of the fifty states’ legal systems. Every state system is characterized by its own set of unique features along with diverse nuances, an outgrowth of their different historical origins, and the extensive multiplicity that exists in the number of cases every state system may be accountable for due to considerable population variations. On the other hand, several ordinary fundamentals exist in all state systems. Each state maintains trial courts that do the huge work of processing cases at the lower levels of the state legal system. These trial courts may listen to appeals from subsidiary courts like traffic courts and provide sites for trials of more imperative crimes. Thirty-nine of the fifty states contain transitional appellate courts, to which all appeals from trial courts ought to be directed first. ...Download file to see next pages Read More