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.
The District Courts are the trial courts of the Federal judicial system and most Federal court cases originate in a District Court. The middle level of the Federal court system consists of the U.S. Court of Appeals, which is divided into 12 regional, or âCircuitâ courts. When a decision is reached in U.S. District Court, a party may request that the decision be reviewed by a three judge panel from the Court of Appeals.