Talk:State supreme court

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[edit] Page title, possible errors

This page is terribly written. At the very least, it should be retitled "court of last resort." Secondly, the notion that state courts of last resort don't "do factual findings" is in error, as several states have supreme courts with original jurisdiction in some matters, just as the U.S. Supreme Court has original jurisdiction in some matters.

You're right that there are a few minor errors, but overall, the page is fine. Furthermore, your renaming proposal is silly. Can you actually cite to a single source, anywhere, that regularly calls them "courts of last resort?" Google Book Search (which searches the full content of thousands of books that Google has scanned in by hand) returns 34,100 hits for the phrase "state supreme court," and Book Search is still in beta (it will be much larger in a few years). In contrast, "court of last resort" gets only 9,850 hits, and many of the hits are clearly referring to court of last resort in its correct sense, meaning the highest court of any jurisdiction. This would include, for example, the European Court of Justice for European Union jurisdictions.--Coolcaesar 06:06, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Doesn't the phrase "court of last resort" describe the function of the courts that are typically named "Supreme Courts"? A page called "State Legislatures" similarly might describe its topic as "representative law-making bodies." The original title is good. --Editing 17:19, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Court locations

It might be worth noting the cities in which the courts are located, because not all of them are in state capitals. Alaska's supreme court is in Anchorage, not Juneau, for example. Are there others? --Editing 17:19, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

There is also the phenomenon of state supreme courts that regularly sit at multiple sites (that is, riding circuit). For example, dating back to the 1860s, the Supreme Court of California has always heard cases in both Northern and Southern California. And it's headquartered in San Francisco, not the state capital of Sacramento. There is a branch office in Sacramento but it is used very infrequently; the huge number of litigants in Los Angeles causes that branch office to be used much more often than the Sacramento office. --Coolcaesar 05:40, 29 December 2006 (UTC)