The US Legal System - Essay Example

The constitution, together with federal rules acts as the supreme law in the country helping to avoid conflicts between the territorial and state laws in the states and territories. The source of both the state and the federal laws was the common law system derived from the English law, which was in use during the Revolutionary War. However, the United States has deviated greatly from its origin and has done most reforms to its law (Burnham 2006).

Cases in the U.S. legal system are decided by the jury. A jury is a group of people elected from among the citizens that are involved in hearing cases and issuing a judgment. This is unlike in mother countries where cases are heard by the judges and it is the same judges that give a ruling. In a jury system, judges are just present to give the law and the legal concepts that guide the judgment of a particular case. The jury decides the ultimate results in a case after a group discussion and it is therefore not a person’s decision. Juries are involved in both civil and criminal cases. Civil cases involve disagreements between private citizens while criminal cases involve the government claiming that certain individuals have committed a crime. The members of the jury are just U.S. citizens and any of them stand a chance to be elected to the jury. Exemptions only occur when a citizen suffers an illness or there is a serious illness in his or her family, where his attendance on the jury would cause him serious financial losses, or when he or she is under an emergency (Burnham 2006).

The U.S. legal system also operates under common law. This is in other words the unwritten law. The law is founded on long-time English law and is used in almost all the states in the U.S. This law follows the common sense of people in the community as it was formulated by the ancestors. The common law is only used when dealing with civil cases. Criminal cases must involve the law that is found in the books of law to convince a person that he or she has violated such law (Cappalli 1997).

• The most important characteristics of the American legal system

One of the most distinctive features of the American Legal system is its decentralization and its reliance on coordinate bodies of equal authority. The political culture and the legal structure of the United States have been and are still focusing on protecting its citizens from oppression by the government. The uncertainty surrounding the potential subjective exercise of authority by the government has been their main concern since the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and also in their decentralized legal system. Power in the American legal system is divided among its states and the federal governments. Most of the powers however lie with the state governments, unlike the federal government which has limited powers. The federal and state governments then have court systems that are divided into executive, legislative, and judiciary. The aim of the separation of powers among the governments is to create a system of checks and balances that ensures that power is divided among the almost equal units of the government in such a way that no unit can practice a monopoly of governmental authority (Farnsworth, 1996).