Federal and State Courts

The first sentence in Article III of the Constitution expressly authorizes Congress \nto create courts. We saw in Chapter 1 that the brief reference to possible "inferior" \ncourts-courts subordinate to the "supreme Court" -was the result of a compromise \nin the Philadelphia deliberations. This chapter presents a sketch of the present-day \nfederal and state court systems and brief accounts of the principal courts in those \nsystems.An appendix includes descriptions of several other important federal courts.