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Authored by: IANALitj on Monday, December 03 2012 @ 11:30 AM EST |
The technical term for deciding which court gets a case is venue. This is
intertwined with another technical term, jurisdiction (which leads to
complications, since jurisdiction is much more important than venue, and covers
several quite different subjects).
The short answer to your question is the very unsatisfying "this is the way
it is." The system has grown up over the course of hundreds of years, and
it works pretty well most of the time.
The longer answer is that the general venue principles do make sense. One is
that if a court has jurisdiction, venue is generally proper where the plaintiff
lives. This makes sense, since that is usually -- not always, but almost always
-- going to be the most convenient venue for the plaintiff.
Another general principle is that the plaintiff gets to make the first choice of
venue if there are several possible places. This not only makes sense but is as
a practical matter a virtual necessity. The plaintiff brings the action to
some court in the first place, and prepares the first paperwork. That paperwork
has to be filed somewhere, and that filing place obviously becomes the original
venue.
These two general rules do make it generally true that the plaintiff will be in
a court that is near its home.
Whether the plaintiff has a home court advantage can be another question. There
is a story (for which I cannot vouch, but it is a good story) that James
Fenimore Cooper and the famous New York editor Horace Greeley were disputing --
and abusing -- each other in print, and a friend asked Greeley if he was afraid
of being sued by Cooper for libel. Greeley is said to have replied that he was
not worried: "He cannot bring it to trial in New York [City], for we are
known here; nor in Otsego, for he is known there."[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- venue - Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, December 03 2012 @ 11:43 AM EST
- venue - Authored by: ukjaybrat on Monday, December 03 2012 @ 11:58 AM EST
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