This paper attempts to provide a brief explanation for non-United States lawyers of the structure of the legal system of the United States. Lawyers who have not been trained in the United States legal system may be puzzled when reading the decisions of our federal courts. It seems that the complex notion of federal jurisdiction and the invariable discussion about whether or not a court has jurisdiction over a matter before it are particularly perplexing. This is to be expected from lawyers who practise in a legal framework that is essentially a unitary structure. Some of the difficulty in understanding the American legal system stems from the fact that in the United States there exists two parallel sets of courts; that is, there are both national or “federal” courts, as they are commonly called, and state courts. There is a federal court system and in each state there exists a separate state court system. To a certain extent each of the respective sets of courts is self contained and, with some qualification to be explained later, they are independent of each other.

The federal courts may be described as a three-tiered system, because the courts are arranged in a hierarchy of three levels. At the first or lowest level there are the United States District Courts. These are courts of first instance. They are trial courts with general jurisdiction over both civil and criminal cases. The district courts often sit with a jury in both civil and criminal cases when a party exercises his right to a jury trial.1 The United States has been divided by Congressional legislation into numerous federal judicial “districts” based on geographic and population considerations. For example, the State of Louisiana is divided into three federal judicial districts. The south-eastern part of the state has been designated as the Eastern District of Louisiana. The central area is the Middle District of Louisiana. The northern and western parts of the state have been designated as the Western District of Louisiana. In each of these three districts there is a “District Court” staffed with a number of judges ranging from two to 13. There are 13 district judges in the Eastern District, two judges in the Middle District, and five judges in the Western District. Each of these judges, as is true of every judge who