The U.S. District Courts

The district courts are the federal judiciary's front line. The Judiciary Act of 1789 created one for each of the thirteen states, and as the country grew Congress added more, splitting large states into several districts. There are now ninety-four: eighty-nine in the fifty states, one in the District of Columbia, one in Puerto Rico, and three territorial courts in Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Every state has at least one. Texas, California, and New York each have four. The district court is the only level of the federal system where a jury hears evidence and witnesses testify.

A case lands in federal rather than state court for one of two main reasons: it arises under federal law or the Constitution, or it is a dispute between citizens of different states worth more than seventy-five thousand dollars. Criminal prosecutions brought by U.S. Attorneys, civil rights suits, patent and copyright claims, bankruptcy, immigration habeas petitions, and suits against the federal government all begin here. Roughly four hundred thousand civil and criminal cases are filed each year, plus a separate bankruptcy caseload that runs into the hundreds of thousands. The great majority settle or end on motions without a trial.

About 677 district judgeships are authorized, filled by presidential nomination and Senate confirmation and held for life. Because that is not enough for the workload, Congress created magistrate judges, appointed by the district judges for eight-year terms, who handle preliminary matters, misdemeanors, and, with the parties' consent, entire civil cases. Bankruptcy judges, appointed by the courts of appeals for fourteen-year terms, sit as units of the district courts. Each district also has a U.S. Attorney, a U.S. Marshal, a clerk's office, and a probation office, though those belong to the executive branch or the court's administration rather than the bench.

District judges have become national figures in a way the framers never imagined. Because any one of them can issue an injunction halting a federal policy, and because that injunction has at times applied nationwide, a single trial judge can freeze an executive order the day it is signed. The Supreme Court narrowed that practice in 2025, but the question of how far one district court's order should reach remains unsettled. Where a case is filed, and therefore which judges might hear it, has become a strategic decision for both sides.