FORTY YEARS AGO last Sunday, five men broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington DC in a botched operation that would spark a chain of events that two years later would see Richard Nixon resign as the 37th president of the United States.
District Courts and Circuit Courts (or Federal courts of appeals) are part of the federal court system. District courts are lower and have the responsibility for holding trials, while circuit courts are appellate courts that do not hold trials but only hear appeals for cases decided by the lower court.
District courts hold federal trials, while the circuit courts hold both trials and appeals for cases decided by district courts. Within the country and its associated territories, there are 94 district courts (at least one per state) and 13 circuit courts. The district court is where a federal case begins.