Law, Justice and Society: Chapter Four

This chapter has a lot of very useful and important information in it. However, what I found most interesting was the lecture over the different jurisdictions. The word jurisdiction is the legal authority or power of a court to hear, pronounce on and decide a case. There are four types of jurisdiction and they are personal, subject matter, geographical and hierarchical. I found this appealing, because of how all different areas for which cases can happen are separated into different categories. Personal jurisdiction is defined as the court having the authority over a certain person. If you think about it, we are all under personal jurisdiction, because we are all citizens of some state. Another way you could fall under this is if you commit an act against the laws of the state.
Subject matter jurisdiction is the authority for a court to hear particular type of case. This type of jurisdiction can hear specific types of cases such as traffic court, juvenile court and probate court. In this sense every specific court will only hear those cases. For example, if I was 16 years-old and stole an article of clothing from JC Penny’s and was caught; I would be sent to the juvenile court within the subject matter jurisdiction.
The third type of jurisdiction is geographical. This is the authority for a court to hear cases that arise within specified boundaries such as city, county, state or country. This is a very interesting jurisdiction to me because it is crazy to think that someone who commits a crime in one state then flees and commits another crime somewhere else and so on, they can be charged for every single individual crime in every state and be sentenced for every one. Being able to prosecute the defendant in every different state does not violate double jeopardy because each place is a separate sovereign government. Since I was so intrigued by this type of jurisdiction I look further into it and found more information on it at http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/jurisdiction.
Lastly, there is the hierarchical jurisdiction which is the division of responsibilities and functions among the various courts. This type of jurisdiction is divided up into four different jurisdictions: general, limited, original and appellate. General/limited jurisdiction is the authority of the court that is not limited to hearing only a particular type of case. Original jurisdiction is the power of the court to hear the case initially. If I were to commit a felony then my case would begin in the district court thus the original jurisdiction is where the trial takes place. Appellate court is simply the power of the court to look over a decision made on a lower court and they can accept or deny the decision.