Representing Court Systems

Typically, an individual courthouse will occupy some position within a state system’s administrative structure. For example, Example County Courthouse might be part of Division 1, which is part of Circuit 1, which is the largest subdivision of the state court system. A conceptual depiction of this mapping is below. Indented elements should be understood to be contained within the jurisdiction of the element above.

State Court System
    Circuit 1
        Division 1
            Example County Courthouse

Mapping the administrative relationship between a court and the system within which it resides allows for top-level analysis of all administrative entities below. An example of how this might be helpful to court administrators is if they want to quickly see the closing times of all courthouses within a particular district. By grouping courthouses together in a logical format, it is possible to query the data of individual courthouses as though they belonged to a single dataset. Please see the Structured Types section for more information about how court systems are represented in the Court Data Standard.