Why are judicial circuits so named? Why are judicial circuits named &quot;judicial circuits&quot;?
The answer by Dale M is basically correct but has some details wrong. US Courts of Appeal Recall that in the US Federal system the circuit courts are the &quot;Courts of Appeal&quot;, that is the middle level of the system, above the district courts, but below the Supreme Court. In the early days of the US, each Justice of the Supreme Court was assigned to one circuit, usually consisting of several adjacent states. The Justice spent roughly half of each year &quot;riding circuit&quot;. The Justice would stop at two to four places in the circuit, where Federal district courts were located.The justice would sit together with one of the district court judges in those places, in the courthouse that would be otherwise used for the district court. That Two-judge panel would constitute the session of the Circuit Court. The places where the circuit court was held were usually state capitols or other large towns or cities. The Justice would not stop at every small town along the way. (I recently read The Marshall Court and Cultural Change: 1815-1835, Which describes the practice in detail. Travel was quite wearing on the Justices. During the actual Supreme Court term, they lived in a boardinghouse in Washington DC, usually the same house for all the Justices. Cases were often discussed after hours at these boardinghouses. The Chief Justice often made arrangements for the coming year's accommodation. The Justices' wives did not normally join them in Washington nor on circuit.) This practice persisted until 1912, but had ceased by the early twentieth century. It stopped in some Circuits sooner than others. There are now permanent judges assigned to the Courts of Appeal, which is now their proper formal name, but the areas over which they have jurisdiction are still known as circuits, and the courts are informally still called the Circuit courts. In fact the judges of the Courts of appeal are often where Presidents look when there is a vacancy on the Supreme Court. Each circuit still has a supervising Justice assigned to it. That Justice handles certain &quot;emergency&quot; appeals from the circuit court, either ruling on them at once, or relaying them to the full Supreme Court. English Assize Circuits In England, before the US existed, judges rode circuit. These assize circuits were defined by statute in 1293, and remained in use until they were replaced by the Crown Court in 1972 under the Courts Act 1971 Western US In the West and Mid-west of the US during the nineteenth century, some state courts (not federal courts) rode circuit in areas where the population was not dense enough to support a full time stationary court. The Judge was often accompanied by a group of lawyers, whom would take on the various cases that awaited the judge. However, these courts are not what is usually meant by &quot;circuit courts&quot; in US usage. These judges did often stop at a relatively large number of small towns, often county seats or comparable locations, where a county courthouse might exist. This practice stopped at different times in different areas, but it was obsolete by the early twentieth century.
If you have something to say, you should have said it before now When a judge is about to hand down a decision the case is all but over. Just like figure skating at the Olympics, the points are scored even if nobody but the judges know what they are yet. The onus is on the parties to bring forward all the evidence and make all the submissions on the law that they want the judge to consider before and during the hearing. If they didn't then that's their fault and they can't introduce new stuff now. Now, it's not uncommon for a judge to share their thoughts during the hearing or in writing when considering written submissions. This is because their thinking on the law is at variance with what the parties are contending. The plaintiff says the law is X, the defendant says the law is Y, the judge thinks they're both idiots and the law is clearly Z. They will usually call for submissions on this because the judge's role is to decide the dispute between the parties on the evidence the contend -not to impose the judge's interpretation on them; by doing this the parties may relies the judge is right and a lot of the dispute disappears or they may convince the judge that they are wrong (it's not unknown) and move on from a clear agreed position.
County Courts do not have official neutral citations and are placed in the Miscellaneous category by the British and Irish Legal Information Institute, who nowadays acts as the unofficial case reporter in the UK. See https://www.bailii.org/bailii/citation.html for a list of courts whose proceedings have official neutral citations. The series number appears to be decided by BAILII, probably based on the time it publishes a case.
These clauses are called recitals. Taken together, they are a form of preamble. The tradition of preambles is quite ancient. The Code of Hammurabi, for example, has a preamble. This preamble serves to establish the authority of the one enacting the laws, however, rather than his motivation. United Nations instruments typically use a series of participial phrases as preambular paragraphs (pdf) rather than subordinate clauses, but they have the same function of establishing context and motivation. I have not been able to locate the origin of this particular form of preamble, however. It seems to have evolved gradually from freely constructed preambles. I could not identify when this form became fixed.
The English language does not have the equivalent of the French Academy to officially regulate questions of spelling, grammar, punctuation and word meaning. Jurists don't control how the language is used and for the most point don't bother to try to do so. Also, context almost always clarifies this particular ambiguity.
The only thing which has a name and sounds somewhat like what you're talking about is &quot;jury nullification&quot;. This generally refers to the situation where a jury deliberately sets aside the judges instructions about the law and supplies their own interpretation. For example, Peter Zenger was technically guilty of seditious libel because as a matter of law the material was sedition libel and the only legal question was whether he had published it. The jury found him not guilty, on the grounds that the statements were true, but truth was not an element of the crime. It is the general pattern in the US that the judge is the only person empowered to say to the jury what the law is. By selecting specific instructions (phrased as &quot;If you conclude X, you must find the defendant guilt&quot;, that is, stating the &quot;finding-to-verdict&quot; equation), the jury is given a formula for figuring out what the law says. Trial judges are not the ones who decide what the &quot;framers&quot; of the law intended, that comes from higher appeals courts who may study the legislative history. It can happen that a law uses an unclear phrase like &quot;irreconcilable differences&quot; and the jury doesn't know exactly what that means: then the judge may tell them to decide on their own, or give them a dictionary (however, there probably is an instruction for divorce law, and it's unlikely that a jury would be involved in a simple marital dissolution). It is entirely possible that jurors will end up misinterpreting what the law says in some instance, but I doubt that it happens very often. It is more likely that jurors will deviate somewhat, compared to judges in a bench trial, in matters of judgment such as whether an action is &quot;reasonable&quot;.
The origins aren't known exactly, as it turns out. Court dress goes back quite some time. Edward III - living up to the example of Edward I, and his legal improvements - was not the first to mandate that judges wear appropriate attire, but it became established during his reign. Judges of importance wore robes lined with fur and silk. Their attire also included a hood and cowl, as well as a mantle. Colors varied, with violet being the color of choice in the winter green in the summer. In medieval times, the coif, a white cap, was used by monks. Skullcaps (in black) were adopted later on, but wigs became the head covering of choice in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, largely because they became part of the formal clothing worn at the time - not just inside courtrooms. References: Court and Tribunals Judiciary Wigs, Coifs, and Other Idiosyncrasies of English Judicial Attire
The exact procedure varies from one district to the next, but generally speaking, it is essentially by lottery. The procedure is typically spelled out in the court's local rules. Jump to page 105 of SDNY's local rules for an example. The lottery system is not entirely random, though. Frequently it is weighted to make it more likely that a case is assigned to a judge from the district's courthouse nearest to the parties, or to make it less likely to be assigned to the chief judge or a judge on senior status. There are then various other rules governing assignments of cases to new judges or visiting judges, but those typically don't happen when a case is originally filed.