In The United States
The United States is a federation of sovereign states. The U.S. Constitution creates a federal government and legislature which has general powers over the territory of the whole and over foreign policy, whereas the individual states have their own governments that, within the scope allowed by the federal constitution, have local territorial jurisdiction. There is a system of federal courts which have jurisdiction to hear charges alleging federal crimes, and state courts have jurisdiction to hear charges alleging violations of local state law.
Read more about this topic: Criminal Jurisdiction
Famous quotes containing the words united states, united and/or states:
“It is a curious thing to be a woman in the Caribbean after you have been a woman in these United States.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“In the larger view the major forces of the depression now lie outside of the United States, and our recuperation has been retarded by the unwarranted degree of fear and apprehension created by these outside forces.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“The people of the United States have been fortunate in many things. One of the things in which we have been most fortunate has been that so far, due perhaps to certain basic virtues in our traditional ways of doing things, we have managed to keep the crisis of western civilization, which has devastated the rest of the world and in which we are as much involved as anybody, more or less at arm’s length.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)