Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Circuit court
Summary
Circuit courts are court systems in several common law jurisdictions. It may refer to:
Courts that literally sit 'on circuit', ie judges move around a region or country to different towns or cities where they will hear cases
Courts that sit within a judicial circuit, an administrative division of a country's judiciary
A higher-level trial court, eg for felony or indictment offences
The term "circuit court" is derived from the English custom of itinerant courts whose judges periodically travelled on pre-set paths - or circuits - to hear cases from different areas.
The first formal circuits were defined in 1293, when a statute was enacted which established four assize circuits.
It was long assumed that these circuits originated with the eyre in common pleas during the reign of Henry II, but during the late 1950s, legal historians such as Ralph Pugh recognized that the eyre's "connection with later circuit justices is rather collateral than lineal", and the eyre was merely one of a number of experiments in "systematized itinerant justice" undertaken by the English crown during the late 12th century and the 13th century.
The development of the assize circuits was interrupted in 1305 by the appointment of justices of trailbaston by King Edward I. Under King Edward III, two statutes were enacted in 1328 and 1330 which restored the assize circuits and reorganized the counties of England into six circuits where assizes were supposed to be held thrice yearly (but were more often held twice each year).
By 1337, the six assize circuits had stabilized as follows:
During the 1500s, two major changes occurred. Middlesex was removed from the Home Circuit and grouped with the adjacent City of London (which was never part of the circuits), and Oxfordshire and Berkshire were transferred from the Western Circuit to the Oxford Circuit. The Welsh county of Monmouthshire was also transferred into the Oxford Circuit.
After that, the circuits of England remained largely static for almost four centuries, until they were again reorganized during the 19th century.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.