United States Federal Judicial District
For purposes of the federal judicial system, Congress has divided the United States into judicial districts. There are 94 federal judicial districts, including at least one district in each state, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Three territories of the United States — the Virgin Islands, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands — have district courts that hear federal cases, including bankruptcy cases. The breakdown of what is in each judicial district is at 28 U.S.C. §§ 81–131.
Federal judicial districts have also been established in the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Courts in other insular areas are territorial courts under Article I of the Constitution, not United States district courts, although they have similar jurisdiction.
Only two districts have jurisdiction over areas outside the state in which the court sits:
- The District of Wyoming includes all of Yellowstone National Park, including areas in Montana and Idaho.
- The District of Hawaii includes Midway Island, Palmyra Island, and a number of other uninhabited Pacific island possessions of the United States.
Each district has its own United States district court (with a bankruptcy court under its authority), including judges, clerks, court reporters, and other support personnel, all employed by the judicial branch of the government and overseen by the Administrative Office of the Courts in Washington, D.C. There is also a United States Attorney in each district, who acts as the federal government's lawyer in the district, both prosecuting federal criminal cases and defending the government (and its employees) in civil suits against them; the U.S. Attorney is not employed by the judicial branch but by the Department of Justice, part of the executive branch. There is also a Federal Public Defender who represents people charged with federal crimes who cannot afford to hire their own lawyers; some FPDs cover more than one judicial district. Each district also has a United States Marshal who serves the court system.
Read more about United States Federal Judicial District: List of Districts
Famous quotes containing the words united states, united, states, federal, judicial and/or district:
“Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States—first, murder stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“The city of Washington is in some respects self-contained, and it is easy there to forget what the rest of the United States is thinking about. I count it a fortunate circumstance that almost all the windows of the White House and its offices open upon unoccupied spaces that stretch to the banks of the Potomac ... and that as I sit there I can constantly forget Washington and remember the United States.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“The Federal Constitution has stood the test of more than a hundred years in supplying the powers that have been needed to make the Central Government as strong as it ought to be, and with this movement toward uniform legislation and agreements between the States I do not see why the Constitution may not serve our people always.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)