Yes, both civil and criminal cases are heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. (If I had to guess I would say that criminal cases are the majority of petitions for a writ of certiorari, but the majority of certiorari grants are civil cases.)
The same is true of state supreme courts, although two states, I believe (Texas and Oklahoma) have separate courts of last resort for criminal and civil cases.
Alaska has a court of appeals that only hears criminal appeals. Civil cases are appealed directly to the State Supreme Court.
You’re confusing us, Rick. In the quoted post, you say that he both raised the Fourth Amendment and failed to raise the Fourth Amendment (see below).
I’m not speaking for Bricker, but it can happen that way. Perhaps he brouht the issue up at trial, and some Justices thought he raised it sufficiently, but some of the others thought he didn’t and that he waived it by not raising the issue properly.
Thanks for answering. I think you answered the question I really meant to ask.
As best I know:
**Bricker **and **Really Not All That Bright **are US lawyers. **Northern Piper **is a Canadian lawyer. I’m not a lawyer but my wife is a US lawyer.
There are a boatload more lawyers & paralegals & even a judge or two on the 'Dope but not yet in this thread.
And sorry if I skipped anyone.
Yes, but I believe that the Supreme Court may also hear criminal appeals from the intermediate appeals court.
That’s right. Plus Procrustus is a US lawyer.
Not exactly. I said some justices concluded he raised it, and others concluded he didn’t.
The general rule is that at trial, an objection like that must be raised with enough specificity to allow the trial court to intelligently rule on the issue. This prevents the defense from gaming the system… sitting on an issue instead of raising it, knowing that an acquittal anyway is good and a conviction would be reversed by bringing the issue up on appeal for the first time.
So sometimes whether an issue has been properly preserved for appeal is itself a threshold determination that must be made by an appeals court. Perhaps the defense merely objected based on “constitutional guarantees.” One appellate judge might say that the constitutional violation was so plain that this was sufficient to alert the trial judge, while another might say that the defense needed to specifically mention the Fourth Amendment case law that defines the issue at hand.
So in my hypothetical, that’s what’s happening: one set of justices would resolve the case by finding the issue was never preserved for appeal and therefore the conviction stands, another by finding it was preserved but the conviction should stand anyway, and one finding it was preserved and the trial judge erred so the conviction should be reversed.
Acsenray is an American lawyer, too. I think in total there are probably about 30-40 regular posters who have publicly identified as attorneys on the SDMB.
In Florida, the state supreme court hears roughly equal numbers of criminal and civil cases (as you can see on this rather confusing PDF).
However, a great many of the civil cases are actually administrative matters in the sense of Administrative Law (appeals from state agency action*) and “administrative matters” in the sense that they are other things the FSC is charged with administering (lawyer discipline, approving or rejecting proposed changes to the rules of procedure, and changes to the bar admission requirements).
*I am not sure if the view is universal, but administrative law is generally considered to be a separate body of law from civil and criminal proceedings; the parties are the state and an invididual or corporation, as in criminal law, but administrative proceedings do not result in punitive measures like prison time, as in civil law.
I tend to think of everything as either criminal or civil. Admin matters are civil because no-one’s going to jail. 
There can also be admin matters where the government is not a party. Cases in the labour relations board involve the union and the employer, which can be a private company. We have other boards which are specialised dispute solvers where the government is not a party, like the farm land security board (mediated disputes between farmers and banks) or the surface rights board (mediates disputes between the owner of the surface of the land and the owner of the minerals underneath). Governments need not be involved in admin matters and the admin matters often take specialised issues that otherwise would go to the civil courts, so I’d say they’re civil matters.
I’m the same way, but I think there’s a certain historical justification for RNATB’s distinction, arising from the differences in procedure. It’s maybe a question of whether to call it a kingdom or a phylum.
Admiralty always used to be thought of as a separate species of law, too, with its own rules and procedures (and, famously, its own courtroom flags). I may be wrong, but I think that stemmed from the idea that admiralty jurisdiction was in rem rather than in personam – i.e., that the case is about a ship, rather than about this person vs. that person.
Thank you. Now, that’s what I call a clarification. 
That is true. In fact, that’s how my field works - my cases involve two parties before the equivalent of ADMs. I was really just simplifying for brevity.
I think that’s the other major distinction, though - administrative cases are heard by administrative hearing officers rather than Article III-equivalent judges, and only the appeals go before courts of law.
Isn’t US admin law mainly statutory? Ours has its roots in the common law of prerogative writs, so it feels civil to me.
I think it was also that in England, Admiralty courts were clearly separate beasts from the common law courts, and the species of law they administered had much stronger connections to the continental civil law than was the case with the economic law. The in rem distinction was also important, though.
Like all American law, even statutes and their application have to be interpreted by courts.
Still, depending on what you mean by “mostly,” administrative law might “mostly” be administrative law, that is regulations promulgated by administrative agencies pursuant to statutory authority.
Sure, there’s always judicial interpretation. But I was meaning the source of the law governing administrative matters. In my jurisdiction, it’s largely common law, not statutory, and based on the old prerogative writs.
For example, last summer I ran a certiorari application. In our world that’s got nothing to do with Supreme Court stuff. It’s the way you apply to the Queen’s Bench for review of a decision by an inferior court, using the principles of the prerogative writs from the English courts.
I’m not exactly sure what you’re asking. Administrative law—like pretty much all American law—is a combination of constitutional, statutory, and common law, all interpreted and applied by courts, which adds another layer of common law. Plus, there’s the added layer of regulatory law, which is a type of law created by executive agencies pursuant to the authority of statutes.
American administrative law is all those things. In that context, asking if it’s “mostly statutory” seems almost meaningless to me. I couldn’t begin to figure out how to answer that question.
American law still has all the old writs, bit only a few of them are commonly used—writ of capias, writ of mandamus, writ of certiorari, writ of habeus corpus.
That sound like exactly the same as how a writ of certiorari works in our system, only it’s used at the Supreme Court level.