Court

This article is about courts of law. For other uses of the term, see Court (disambiguation).

A trial at the Old Bailey in London as drawn by Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin for Ackermann's Microcosm of London (1808-11).

A court is a public forum used by a power base to adjudicate disputes and dispense civil, labour, administrative and criminal justice under its laws. In common law and civil law states, courts are the central means for dispute resolution, and it is generally understood that all persons have an ability to bring their claims before a court. Similarly, those accused of a crime have the right to present their defense before a court.

Court facilities range from a simple farmhouse for a village court in a rural community to huge buildings housing dozens of courtrooms in large cities.

Trial and appellate courts

Each state establishes a court system for the territory under its control. This system allocates work to courts or authorized individuals by granting both civil and criminal jurisdiction (in the United States, this is termed subject-matter jurisdiction). The grant of power to each category of court or individual may stem from a provision of a written constitution or from an enabling statute. In English law, jurisdiction may be inherent, deriving from the common law origin of the particular court. For this purpose, courts may be classified as trial courts (sometimes termed "courts of first instance") and appellate courts. Some trial courts may function with a judge and a jury: juries make findings of fact under the direction of the judge who makes findings of law and, in combination, this represents the judgment of the court. In other trial courts, decisions of both fact and law are made by the judge or judges. Juries are less common in court systems outside the Anglo-American common law tradition.

In a common law system, appellate courts may be arranged in a hierarchy and their function is to review the decisions of trial courts (and of lower appellate courts) and, generally, they only address questions of law, i.e. whether the lower courts interpreted and applied the law correctly, or procedure. These hearings do not usually involve considering factual matters unless new evidence has come to light. Such factual evidence as is admitted will only be considered for the purposes of deciding whether the case should be remitted to a first instance court for a retrial unless, in criminal proceedings, it is so clear that there has been a miscarriage of justice that the conviction can be quashed.

Personal jurisdiction

In the United States, a court must have personal jurisdiction over a defendant to hear a case brought by a plaintiff against that defendant. There are three kinds of personal jurisdiction: in personam jurisdiction, in rem jurisdiction, and quasi in rem jurisdiction. A detailed discussion of personal jurisdiction is beyond the scope of this article; however, personal jurisdiction (in the United States) generally refers to the legal sufficiency of the connection between the defendant and the forum (the U.S. state) in which the court is located. See e.g. Pennoyer v. Neff, see also Minimum contacts and International Shoe v. Washington.

Civil law courts and common law courts

The two major models for courts are the civil law courts and the common law courts. Civil law courts are based upon the judicial system in France, while the common law courts are based on the judicial system in Great Britain. In most civil law jurisdictions, courts function under an inquisitorial system. In the common law system, most courts follow the adversarial system. Procedural law governs the rules by which courts operate: civil procedure for private disputes (for example); and criminal procedure for violation of the criminal law.

Tribunal

See arbitration.

Sanctions

Sanctions is the plural of sanction. Depending on context, a sanction can be either a punishment or a permission. The word is a contronym. In a legal context, sanctions are penalties imposed by the courts.

International judicial institution

International judicial institutions can be divided into courts, arbitral tribunals and quasi-judicial institutions. Courts are permanent bodies, with near the same composition for each case. Arbitral tribunals, by contrast, are constituted anew for each case. Both courts and arbitral tribunals can make binding decisions. Quasi-judicial institutions, by contrast, make rulings on cases, but these rulings are not in themselves legally binding; the main example is the individual complaints mechanisms available under the various UN human rights treaties.

Institutions can also be divided into global and regional institutions.

The listing below incorporates both currently existing institutions, defunct institutions that no longer exist, institutions which never came into existence due to non-ratification of their constitutive instruments, and institutions which do not yet exist, but for which constitutive instruments have been signed. It does not include mere proposed institutions for which no instrument was ever signed.

International criminal court

File:International Criminal Court logo.svg

The official logo of the ICC

The International Criminal Court (ICC) was established in 2002 as a permanent tribunal to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression, although it cannot currently exercise jurisdiction over the crime of aggression. The court came into being on July 1 2002 — the date its founding treaty, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, entered into force — and it can only prosecute crimes committed on or after that date.

As of August 2007, 104 states are members of the Court; Japan will become the 105^th state party on 1 October 2007. A further 41 countries have signed but not ratified the Rome Statute. However, a number of states, including China, India and the United States, are critical of the Court and have not joined.

The Court can generally exercise jurisdiction only in cases where the accused is a national of a state party, the alleged crime took place on the territory of a state party, or a situation is referred to the Court by the United Nations Security Council. The Court is designed to complement existing national judicial systems: it can exercise its jurisdiction only when national courts are unwilling or unable to investigate or prosecute such crimes. Primary responsibility to punish crimes is therefore left to individual states.

To date, the Court has opened investigations into four situations: Northern Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic and Darfur. The Court has issued eight arrest warrants and one suspect, Thomas Lubanga, is in custody, awaiting trial.

People who acted as their own attorney

Some legal jurisdictions permit defendants to act as their own attorneys during a trial. Recent studies have shown that four out of five such defendants in the United States are found guilty. Defendants often act as their own attorneys because they distrust lawyers or want to use their trials to make political points. This is a list of prominent cases in which defendants have served or are serving as their own attorneys.

• Francisco Mayorga, prosecuted twice for the same cause, defended himself successfully before two juries in Nicaragua both in 2001 and 2003.
• Horatio Bottomley, on many occasions.
• Ted Bundy acted as his own attorney at his trials for murder in Utah and Florida. He was executed in Florida in 1989.
• Colin Ferguson represented himself at his trial for murder in 1993. He was sentenced to six-life terms in prison.
• Dr. Jack Kevorkian defended himself unsuccessfully in Michigan in 1999 of second-degree murder in death of patient with Lou Gehrig's disease.
• Nelson Mandela defended himself, but was sentenced to life at Robbeneiland.
• Zacarias Moussaoui defended himself at his trial for conspiring to commit the terrorist attacks on the United States of America. He avoided the death penalty and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
• Slobodan Milošević, in front of ICTY, because he dismissed the tribunal as illegitimate. He was forcibly assigned counsel.
• John Allen Muhammad, accused Beltway Sniper, briefly acted as his own attorney, but after just days returned to using lawyers.
• Vojislav Šešelj, in front of ICTY.
• Sam Sloan, self-defended before the Supreme Court.
• James J. Strang, successfully defended himself against numerous charges, including treason.
• James A. Traficant Jr., a former U.S. representative from Ohio, defended himself at his trial for 10 counts of bribery, tax evasion and racketeering and was sentenced to serve eight years in prison.
• Ramzi Yousef, believed to be the mastermind behind the first World Trade Center attack.
• Afeni Shakur, accused of taking part in numerous bombings as a member of the Panther 21

Some people who have tried to assert their right to act as their own attorney have not been permitted to do so. These people include:

• Larry Flynt
• Charles Manson

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See also

General

• Sanctions
• International judicial institution
• International Criminal Court
• List of people who have acted as their own attorney

Court terminology

• Adjudication
• Contempt of court
• Judicial economy
• Jurist
• Legal proceedings
• Quash
• Relevancy
• Rebuttal
• Subpoena
• Testimony

Types and organization of courts

• Appellate court
• Constitutional Court
• Court en banc
• Court of Faculties
• Court-martial
• Courts of England and Wales
• Ecclesiastical court
• Equity court
• Family court
• High Court of Justiciary
• Revolutionary Tribunal (French Revolution)
• Scots Law
• Scottish Courts Service
• Supreme court
• Trial court

External links

• US federal courts
• Directory of State Court websites
• Court TV (coverage of major US trials)
• Directory of local courts in the US

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