Civil and criminal jurisdictions

There is a system of courts for hearing civil actions and a system for criminal actions. These are shown diagrammatically in Figures 1.2 and 1.3. However, some courts have both civil and criminal jurisdiction. 

The court most used is the local Sheriff Court which has wide civil and criminal jurisdiction. Civilly it may sit as a court of first instance or as a court of appeal (to the Sheriff Principal from a sheriff s decision). For criminal cases the sheriff sits with a jury for trials on indictment, and alone to deal with less serious offences prosecuted on complaints, when its jurisdiction encompasses that of the restricted district court. 

By this article, appeals will lie to the supreme court, in all criminal as well as civil causes. This I know, has been disputed by some but I presume the point will appear clear to any one, who will attend to the connection of this paragraph with the one that precedes it. In the former, all the cases, to which the power of the judicial shall extend, whether civil or criminal, are enumerated. There is no criminal matter, to which the judicial power of the United States will extend but such as are included under some one of the cases specified in this section. For this section is intended to define all the cases, of every description, to which the power of the judicial shall reach. But in all these cases it is declared, the supreme court shall have appellate jurisdiction, except in those which affect ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a state shall be a party. If then this section extends the power of the judicial, to criminal cases, it allows appeals in such cases. If the power of the judicial is not extended to criminal matters by this section, I ask, by what part of this system does it appear, that they have any cognizance of them ... 

European jurisdictions have traditionally been resistant to the notion of corporate criminal liability. Civil law penal codes have tended to draw rigid distinctions between criminal and administrative law and to conceive of the former as only applicable to natural persons, in line with Kantian ideals of individualism (Weigend 2008 929) as legal fictions, corporations cannot be said to possess any moral capacity in their own right, separate from that of those individuals who constitute it (Orland and Cachera 1995 112 Weigend 2008 937). For continental jurists. 

The lowest English courts are the magistrates courts, which deal mainly with criminal matters and the county courts, which deal only with civil matters. The Courts and Legal Services Bill provides for an increase in County Court civil jurisdiction. 

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