Remarks and observations concerning American law and cultural studies as it relates to courses taken by students in the University of Osnabrück's and University of Münster's foreign law programs.
Matt LeMieux
19 December 2012
The Two Headed Supreme Court
As students who have heard my lecture on the Common Law Court System might recall, American courts at both the state and federal level are courts of general jurisdiction. Put another way, they hear all kinds of cases and there is not, at least at the highest levels, a division between civil and criminal cases. But students will also remember that I use Texas as an example of the exception to this rule, Texas having a Supreme Court that is the highest court for civil cases and a Criminal Court of Appeals, which sits as the highest court for criminal cases. I ran across an interesting article about the Texas system recently that not only includes a short explanation of how this system developed, but also reports that some in Texas are considering doing away with this unique, by American standards, division of labor. It's worth a read if you are interested in the American court system and some of its idiosyncrasies.