Hi everybody! Its Andy and welcome again to my office in Los Altos, California. I'm
an attorney licensed to practice law in California as well as New York. This
video is going to be a little bit different, I guess. I am not going to go
over a specific, like, contract law concept or a family law concept. Most of
my other videos do kind of take that format. Um, this video is going to
basically go over a lesson in, um, civics or government or social studies. Kind of
depends on what your particular school, you know, high school, for example, called
it and the question I'm going to answer is 'How is the California state court system
organized?' Now I'm going to talk specifically about California, but if you
don't live in California or if you live outside the United States generally,
if you're trying to, I guess, understand court systems in the United States, this
idea that I'm going to go over about a three-tier system is actually very
helpful. As I'll explain, I guess, kind of towards the end of the video, the idea
is the same kind of throughout the United States, but, you know, each
implementation is slightly different. So hopefully that makes sense. Go ahead and
share, comment, like, subscribe, all that nice stuff and if you hang out with me
right now, I will actually go over how the California courts are organized. When
we talk about the California state courts, it's helpful to imagine it as a
system of three levels - level 1 2 & 3 - and the levels escalate, meaning that, you
know, if your case doesn't resolve at level 1 you might be able to appeal it
to level 2, and then if it doesn't resolve there you might be able to
appeal it to level 3. Appeals in California are actually very complicated.
There are a lot of rules, a lot of procedures about them. A lot of times
people will, for some reason which I don't understand, think that they can
just appeal just because they lost. In general, you cannot appeal just because
you are unhappy, or you lost. As you can probably imagine no case would ever
finish if people could just keep on appealing. So anyway, the idea, though, of a
three-level court system, if you can understand that, that's actually
tremendously helpful because a lot of court systems in the United States work
that same way. The federal system does. I think with maybe one exception,
all state court systems work that way also. So anyway all of that said then, in
California the level 1 court is called the Superior Court and those are going
to be located in each county in California.
Excuse me, California has 58 counties so there's 58 Superior Courts. The way that
you refer to it is going to be, you know, Superior Court of the State of
California, County of Santa Cruz, County of Santa Barbara, County of Los Angeles,
etc. The Superior Court in each county has a wide, er, sorry has authority to
hear a wide variety of cases. I just put down two of them family law and disputes
over contracts. However, you know, if you've ever been involved in a probate
case, a personal injury case, medical malpractice case, product def, excuse me,
product defect case, all of those can be heard in Superior Court. There are
certain types of cases that cannot be heard in Superior Court. Those are going
to be like, you know, bankruptcy cases, immigration cases, stuff that is by law
specifically reserved for certain courts. Superior courts cannot hear those cases.
So all of that said, a lot of you are probably thinking that you've never been
to Superior Court before. That may not be true if you've ever been to small claims
court, for example, to sue over, you know, a customer, let's say, who won't pay your
bill. If you've ever been to traffic court to fight a ticket, all of that is in
the Superior Court also except the terminology is just different, like you
know they refer to it as small claims, but it's the small claims division of
the Superior Court. So depending on the type of case, you might also be able to
do an appeal within the Superior Court and that's what the the word appellate
there means. The type of case that I'm most familiar with, you know, that gets
appealed within the Superior Court is landlord-tenant cases. So typically, you
know, a tenant who, you know, tried to fight their eviction and they lost and
they didn't feel, like you know, they should have lost so they appeal and that
appeal is done within the Superior Court. In general, however, if you appeal a case
from the Superior, excuse me, from the Superior Court,
it goes to the appellate courts or the Courts of Appeal and so that's the level
2 courts in our three-level system. There are 58 Superior Courts as I said a
moment ago, but there are only six appellate courts and those are in the
six California cities that I have listed out here. Depending on which of the 58
counties you're appealing from, you will go to one of the six appellate courts.
Generally it's basically, you know, based on geography. So if you're in Northern
California and you appeal to the level 2 courts, you're probably not going to
go to San Diego. Probably going to go to San Francisco, Sacramento, etc. So and like I
said, the level 2 appellate courts, their job is to hear most appeals from
the Superior Courts that are not handled by the Appellate Division of each
Superior Court. So anyway, the level 3 court then, there's only one of those and
it's the California Supreme Court and a lot of times people are surprised to
hear that the Supreme Court of California is actually not in the state
capitol of Sacramento. So the California Supreme Court is actually in San
Francisco and the Supreme Court's job is to hear appeals from the Appellate
Courts. There are certain other duties that the California Supreme Court has,
but the primary one, I think, is the appellate courts, er, sorry to hear
appeals from the Appellate Courts. The last point I want to bring up about the
California Supreme Court is that it is the final decider, the final authority
and the final arbiter on issues of California state law. This is probably a
little too complicated to explain, but depending on how a case is argued and
what claims are made, the law that governs might be federal, it might be, it
might be federal only, it might be state only or it could be a combination of
both. If it is state only, like if it's state law only and you appeal to the
California Supreme Court and you lose, that's it. There is no appeal on state
law issues above the California Supreme Court. Yeah. So sometimes people are sort
of surprised by that because sometimes you can appeal from the California
Supreme Court to the federal system, but sometimes not. So anyway. Moving on
then, I said, I think, a moment ago that if you can understand the whole idea of a
three-level court system that's actually tremendously helpful because this same
three-level system occurs in nearly all states in the US. I think there's one
state that might actually only have two but don't quote me on that.
The one kind of caveat here, I guess, is that even though the three-level system
might be in nearly all states, the naming convention, the terminology is different.
So to give you an example, the level 1 court in California, as we saw from the
previous slide, is called the Superior Court. The level 1 court in the New York
system is called the Supreme Court. The functions are the same, like, you know,
they are the trial courts of general jurisdiction in the state system in each
state. However, the terminology is just different which is a little confusing
for lawyers like me who are California and New York admitted. Mainly because, you
know, the level 1 court in New York, the Supreme Court, is the level 3 court in
California. So the terminology sometimes can get a little confusing. And like I
said also, the federal courts have a very similar three-level system. You might
have heard US District Court, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and, of course, I
think everyone's heard of the US Supreme Court. So a lot of stuff that I have
talked about so far may not apply to other courts and I'm specifically
mentioning specialized courts that are within government agencies.
Those are, I mean, technically they're called an administrative courts, so the
thing is, you know, you might have them within the Social Security
Administration, the Department of Motor Vehicles. You know, if you have a case
where you've applied for unemployment benefits in California, you know, through
EDD, for example, and you, you're denied, you have courts for that. Those courts, in
general, will not have the three-level system that I'm talking about. However
they may have appeals, you know, possibly to courts that do have three-level
systems. So, uh, Social Security, for example, you know they have a system
within the administration. However, you know, if you exhaust all
those appeals, you can appeal to the federal court system where the
three-level idea does apply. So hopefully all of that made sense. The basic idea is
that, you know, there is a three-level system in most court systems in the
United States and it's helpful to kind of know that, you know, you can appeal
from one to the other, but you can't skip over I guess is the idea. And, of course,
the naming convention in each state or jurisdiction can sometimes be different.
So hopefully all that made sense. Go ahead and, you know, subscribe, share,
comment, like etc and I will talk to you guys next time.
Thanks.