Talk:State court (United States)

Pennsylvania in the Table

I changed the part of the table about the intermediate court of appeals in Pennsylvania. There is only one Superior Court in PA. Although it sits in three locations (Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Harrisburg), there are not three separate districts.--Msl5046 (talk) 15:10, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

Restoration

I restored a change from "connection to a U.S. state" to "tried under the laws of a U.S. state" for accuracy because, while few people know this, U.S. state courts have jurisdiction to try cases arising under the law of another state, the law of a foreign country, or federal law. The subject of which law is applied by a state court is known as "choice of law" and is quite complex. To give a simple example, suppose a Colorado man assaults a Colorado woman in Paris, and she wants to sue him for the medical costs she sustained in the assault (I've represented a party in a simliar case). A Colorado state court would have jurisdiction over the case, notwithstanding the fact that the incident didn't take place in Colorado. This is because Colorado courts has a connection with the case, and French law would govern to the extent it is different from Colorado law (e.g. if French law prohibited cohabitants from sueing each other, that would be a valid defense). Both Colorado courts and federal courts in Colorado, at least, would have jurisdiction over this case if the man was from Colorado, the woman was from Maine, and the amount of damages claimed exceeded $75,000. Ohwilleke 21:22, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

I concur. Also, on top of that, there is the mess created by the Erie doctrine. Federal district courts sitting in jurisdiction founded upon diversity of citizenship of the parties can and often do end up trying cases under state substantive law even though there is no federal question. So that's another reason why "tried under the law of a U.S. state is inaccurate," because a federal district court is clearly a different creature than a state court, yet it can also try cases under the substantive law of a state. --Coolcaesar 03:06, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

Other redirects needed

Also Municipal Court, Municipal Courts, Municipal courts. bd2412 T 20:14, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

This is NOT an article on the entire U.S. legal system at the state level!

Just reverted a huge number of good faith edits by User:Ohwillike. The problem is that most of those edits were off-topic in that they attempted to provide a comprehensive view of the entire U.S. legal system, and strayed from the prior narrow focus of this article on state courts. The edits mostly duplicated content already in place at State supreme court, Erie doctrine, United States federal courts, Admission to the bar in the United States, Law of the United States, Attorneys in the United States etc. Those articles are ALREADY enough of a mess as is and NONE of us practicing attorneys who edit Wikipedia has the time or patience to reduce the redundancy between them. We do not need ANOTHER article with even more redundant content. That's what hyperlinks are for---to direct readers to the article that directly addresses a topic. --Coolcaesar (talk) 06:18, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

• I think that was rather brash to do a wholesale reversion of all of his good faith edits. At the least you could have pared them down -- reversion was overkill in my opinion. I had found his work on regulation of lawyers, rule making authority, and the extensive section on the relationship to federal courts to be quite relevant and well written. I'm reinstating all of his good faith edits for now. Just because you might not have the time to maintain the article doesn't mean that others can't help do it (and not just practicing attorneys can help edit such articles). Yes, there is redundancy, but if it helps explain the topic more clearly all in one place without having the reader need to jump between articles, then it is worth it. If you want to eliminate redundancy, a more appropriate tactic would be to use the {{main}} template under a section title, and then provide a brief summary (as opposed to wholesale deleting of the material from the article). --CapitalR (talk) 08:02, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
  • I just started the process of cutting down the article after restoring the previous edits. This could be helped by adding some {{main}} tags where appropriate under various section headers, if anyone wants to help. --CapitalR (talk) 08:20, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
    • The article is still a disorganized mess over a month later. It looks like you're not a lawyer. Any properly trained lawyer would not tolerate such clumsily written prose; it's so appallingly, jaw-droppingly bad that it would require complete rewriting from scratch (as I did with Lawyer years ago), which I do not have the time, energy, or interest to do. Again, I believe the article scope should be kept narrow so as to avoid overlap with the other articles I noted above, since they are all becoming a colossal mess already. Besides, I have enough stress as is, drafting artfully argued briefs that flush my third-tier trash opponents (and their hapless clients) down the toilet. I'm not interested in copyediting TTT work product. I suspect virtually all other competent lawyers feel the same way, which is why the article is still a mess. If no one steps up to the plate, I'm reverting this soon back to the previous version. --Coolcaesar (talk) 09:38, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

Okay, it's been A WHOLE YEAR and no one's stepped forward to clean up this massive pigpen. Guess User:Ohwillike lacks the backbone to finish the mess he/she started (as I had suspected when I wrote the comment above). As Ben Stein would say: Bueller? Bueller? I'm planning to revert back to the previous pre-April 2010 version very, very soon. --Coolcaesar (talk) 06:14, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

And now it's been FOUR more months and the article is STILL a mess. In two more weeks, I'm going to revert back to the old version. User:Ohwillike's pile of crap has clogged up this article long enough. --Coolcaesar (talk) 06:32, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Okay, FOUR YEARS have gone by and no one has stepped up to clean up this mess. I am immediately excising all portions extraneous to the article topic, which violates the Manual of Style (and associated guidance and principles) in about a dozen different ways. --Coolcaesar (talk) 08:44, 20 April 2014 (UTC)

Thoughts about adding an external link?

Good afternoon.I would like to contribute what I consider a valuable resource to your Wikipedia page on State Court. The text below will link to a 50-state directory of state courts and to full-text court decisions from all 50 states. Again, this is a free resource on a website that’s regularly and professionally maintained and updated. ConstructionWebLinks does not charge for access to this information or profit from use of the site. We’ve worked hard to develop some rich resources and simply want to share them. We’ve found that if we try to link to these resources ourselves, our links are removed as potential spam. If you agree that this resource would be useful to users of this page, would you consider adding it? Dawsedit (talk) 18:18, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

• Let's have a look at the link here first. What site do you propose to link to? Cheers! bd2412 T 18:26, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

So sorry that I neglected to paste the link the first time around! Here it is: Fifty-state directory of state courts, free full-text court decisions http://www.constructionweblinks.com/Organizations/Courts/courts.html#state —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dawsedit (talk • contribs) 18:51, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

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Proposed change to Nomenclature table

When I have time in a few months, I propose to revise the table in two important ways. First, the correct terminology is "trial court" and "state supreme court," not "court of first instance" and "court of last resort." The latter terms are seen primarily in civil law jurisdictions. Second, most trial courts should be described in the plural, not the singular. Only a handful of states in the Northeast have a single statewide trial court of general jurisdiction. The majority of states create a separate court for each county, district, or circuit, each with its own separate court staff and budget. --Coolcaesar (talk) 06:25, 27 June 2019 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I still don't have the time to fix this because I'm way too busy working on class actions. Anyone else have the time to fix this? --Coolcaesar (talk) 05:53, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

Hearing no objections, I'm going ahead. --Coolcaesar (talk) 22:34, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

Seconded. BD2412 T 22:42, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

Vague

The first paragraph is vague in "types of cases" for federal courts. Alanscottwalker (talk) 18:16, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

Your edit which I had to revert didn't make it any clearer because it was factually wrong. As I pointed out in my edit summary, almost half of the civil filings in 2022 were diversity filings. To say that federal courts primarily adjudicate federal law is incorrect when they're also dealing with a very large amount of state law issues in diversity matters. The correct way is to link to federal courts (which is what we already have here) and trust users to follow the link. The distinctions between federal and state courts is a massively complex topic that requires about nine paragraphs of text to summarize accurately. It cannot be summarized in the introduction of this article (which is about state courts, not the difference between federal and state courts) without becoming a major digression in its own right. And then some other editor would then correctly argue that such a tangent should be split into a separate article anyway. --Coolcaesar (talk) 19:42, 3 December 2023 (UTC)