State Court (United States) - Differences Among The States

Differences Among The States

• Delaware, Mississippi, New Jersey, and Tennessee make a distinction between a "court of law" and a "court of equity" (chancery court). For the most part in the American legal system, while the distinction between law and equity still has some legal consequences, separate court systems are not maintained at the federal level or in other states.

• Texas and Oklahoma have separate courts of last resort for criminal cases and other cases. In all other states, there is a single court of last resort. While collateral attacks on criminal convictions, such as state level habeas corpus petitions, are usually considered to be technically civil cases, because they are not brought by a prosecutor and do not seek to convict someone of a crime, these suits are, in both states, appealed to the criminal court of last resort, rather than the civil court of last resort.

• In Maryland and New York, the Court of Appeals is the highest state court, and in New York the Supreme Court, Civil Court, and Criminal Court collectively are lower.

• The courts of Louisiana and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico are organized under a civil law model with significantly different procedures from those of the courts in all other states and the District of Columbia, which are organized on an American version of the common law system established originally in England. The court process used in these jurisdictions differs considerably from that used in the federal courts and the courts of other states in non-criminal cases. But, the U.S. Constitution requires these jurisdictions to use procedures similar to those of other U.S. jurisdictions in criminal cases.

• The courts of one state are generally not required to follow the decisions of the courts of another state, but in the common law legal system it is customary for the courts of one state to look to decisions of other states as persuasive statements of what the law should be in the state making the decision, where express statutory provisions do not control.

• Many states lack an intermediate appellate court. In these cases, litigants in general jurisdiction courts have the right to appeal their cases directly to the state supreme court. Many states have rules that permit certain cases such a death penalty cases and election cases directly to the state supreme court, even though most civil cases must be appealled first to an intermediate appellate court.

• In Utah, civil cases are appealed directly to the state supreme court, which then has the power to refer the case instead to an intermediate appellate court, rather than being appealled first to an intermediate appellate court and then to a state supreme court.