Earlier this week I did a stint of jury duty in the Superior Court of Los Angeles County (California). I was Alternate #1, meaning that I sat through the trial but had to remain available up in the juror holding pen while the Twelve deliberated - but I digress.
At this particular courthouse, the various chambers that laymen would call courtrooms were instead known as “departments.” Jurors were sent to “Department M”, for example, which was precisely the label on the room’s door.
Whenever the trial was re-started after a break of any variety, the bailiff’s rapid-fire and hard-to-understand spiel was something along the lines of, “Remain seated*, <unintelligible>, this department is back in session.”
Is this usage nothing more than a peculiarity of terminology, or is there some substantive difference between a court and a department? Is it even that unusual, as I had first assumed? Any insights into the previously-unknown-to-me naming convention would be appreciated.
Most of the melodramatic touches like everybody standing while the judge made a suitably awe-inspiring entrance were foregone, thankfully.
Here in NY, we call them parts. When I was first admitted, I always thought how weird this was. After 10 years, it’s pretty normal. It’s just a terminology they use; I guess it means that this courtroom is a part of the court.
However, I think the explanation in your case might be that Department M is for misdemeanors. Did they have a Department F (for felonies) as well?
Thanks, jgroub. I pulled the letter M out of thin air - it was actually Department E that I was sent to, and I can’t tell if there is any real significance to the letter. It was right next door to Department F. This was a criminal trial, on two misdemeanor counts.
Here is the directory of the judges at the Long Beach Courthouse, where I was. There seems to be a pretty random smattering of both letters and numbers to identify the various rooms (which, ironically, are referred to as “courtrooms” on that directory page :smack: ).
Just at random, I chose another court within the system: Here’s the judges list from the (apparently much smaller) Glendale Courthouse. The only thing I note is that they seem to use a similar scheme (1,2,3,5,D,E,F).
Well, this week I was juror number one in a civil case - for about 2 minutes. When we came into the court room the first morning of the trial, the judge said that there was a motion he agreed to, and we were dismissed. This was in Department 15 of the Alameda County, California, courthouse. I think the departments went up to 19 or so. Maybe it is just the number of court rooms?
In California, there is one superior court for each county in the state. So, Los Angeles County Superior Court is one court (and the largest court in the country: Cook County Court in Chicago is second). In practice the word “department” means a particular courtroom. Usually it is the same judge–and only that judge–who sits in that department. But, when a judge is retired or leaves the bench for some other reason, a new judge will be assigned to that department. Why they use the term “department” to refer to a particular subdivision of the court I don’t know but they do in all of the California courts that I know about.
As noted above, in New York they generally–but not always–use the term “part” to refer to a particular judge’s courtroom. The New York court system is much older than the California Court system, and has more weird holdovers from its much longer history. For one thing, New York calls its main trial court the “supreme court”, even though every other “supreme court” in the county is the highest appellate court.
To be hypertechnical about it, in New York there is only one supreme court , but it has a branch in every county in the state. A particular county can set up multiple “parts”. Some of the larger counties have parts devoted to particular types of cases.
I take this back. Actually I believe that individual judge’s courtrooms in New York are always called “parts”. But they also use the term part to refer to other subdivisions. I am still struggling to find consistency in New York’s use of the terms “civil term” “civil branch” “civil part” “trial part” and “commercial division”, just to name a few.
Yeah, I agree, it’s pretty messed up in NY. Here’s some useless information that semi-relates to the topic, there are only technically 2 main divisions of the Court system in NY - the Court of Appeals (the highest Court in the state) and everything else. The intermediate appellate court is technically part of the Supreme Court (which is the initial branch of the court that has jurisdiction over any controversy). It is referred to as the “Supreme Court - Appellate Division”. In reality, though, no one thinks of it like this, but instead thinks of it as the 3 levels of the Court.
Then there are inferior courts to the Supreme Court, which include some of those you mentioned, like the civil court, small claims court, town and village courts. It’s very hard to keep 'em all straight without a diagram, and even then it’s tough.
Down here, the Spanish term for the judiciary subdivisions is “Salas” (halls, rooms) and the English term is “Section”, and are used both to refer to the particular room/judge combination AND the jurisdictional subdivision.
We have the Court of First Instance, divided in Superior and Municipal Sections, and the Superior Sections are in turn divided into the penal, family, civil, etc. Sections, and identified by location. Thus:
The General Court of Justice (name of the unified commonwealth-wide judiciary system), Court of First Instance, Municipal Sala/Section for Ciales.
The General Court of Justice, Court of First Instance, Superior Civil Sala/Section for San Juan.