Definition
"Courts of the United States" is a term of art referring to the federal courts constituted under the authority of the United States Constitution and acts of Congress. It encompasses the full array of federal judicial tribunals exercising judicial power on behalf of the national government, as distinguished from state courts, territorial courts operating under congressional plenary power, and administrative bodies exercising quasi-judicial functions.
The phrase carries both a constitutional dimension and a statutory one. Constitutionally, it refers to courts established pursuant to Article III, which vests the judicial power of the United States in "one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish." Statutorily, Congress has at various times defined the phrase explicitly for purposes of particular federal codes, and that statutory definition may be broader or narrower than the constitutional category depending on the enactment.
At any given moment in American legal history, the specific courts falling within this designation have varied substantially. The present federal court system includes: the Supreme Court of the United States; the United States Courts of Appeals (circuit courts); the United States District Courts; the United States Court of International Trade; and the United States Court of Federal Claims, among specialized tribunals.
Common Confusion
Two distinctions persistently cause confusion in historical research.
First, Article III courts and Article I (legislative) courts are not the same, though both may fall under the umbrella of "courts of the United States" in some statutory usages. Article III judges enjoy life tenure and salary protections; Article I courts — including certain territorial courts, military courts, and administrative tribunals — do not. Whether a particular court is an Article III court matters enormously for questions of jurisdiction, judicial independence, and the constitutional validity of certain proceedings.
Second, the United States Senate sitting as a court of impeachment has historically appeared in enumerations of "courts of the United States" (as in the first edition of Black's). This is technically accurate in a narrow sense but misleading for most research purposes: the Senate's impeachment function is political and constitutional, not judicial in the Article III sense, and the Senate sitting for impeachment does not exercise the "judicial power" that Article III courts exercise.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
The historical enumeration has evolved through successive eras of federal court organization:
Pre-1891 era: Supreme Court, circuit courts (sitting as trial and appellate courts), and district courts formed the core structure. No intermediate appellate tier existed in the modern sense.
Post-1891 era: The Evarts Act created the circuit courts of appeals, adding a true intermediate appellate layer and beginning the separation of trial and appellate functions at the federal level.
Post-1911 era: The Judicial Code of 1911 abolished the original circuit courts (distinct from circuit courts of appeals), consolidating trial jurisdiction in the district courts. The circuit courts of appeals were later redesignated as the United States Courts of Appeals in 1948.
Modern era: The current structure — district courts, courts of appeals, and the Supreme Court as the constitutional core, supplemented by the Court of Federal Claims, Court of International Trade, and specialized Article I tribunals — reflects further congressional reorganization under Title 28 of the United States Code.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus must account for two major research hazards tied to this term.
First, the enumeration problem: historical sources list different courts as belonging to this category depending on when the source was written. Black's first edition includes the circuit courts as a distinct entry; the second edition adds the court of private land claims and the customs court, reflecting intervening legislation. A researcher using an early-twentieth-century source to understand federal jurisdiction in, say, an 1880s case will find mismatches. Always anchor the enumeration to the date of the dispute or statute under review.
Second, the Article III versus Article I trap: many courts that have historically been called "courts of the United States" in statutes or secondary sources are not Article III courts. Territorial courts, the Court of Military Appeals, and various administrative courts have been grouped under the phrase in particular statutory contexts. When the constitutional status of a court matters to the research question — and in federal practice, it often does — the label alone is insufficient. The researcher must trace the organic statute of the court in question.
Additionally, Anderson's Dictionary of Law grounds the term in the constitutional text itself (Article III, Sections 1 and 2), which is the correct starting point for understanding the scope of federal judicial power. The constitutional text sets the outer boundary; Congress carves the actual institutional structure within that boundary.
The phrase "courts of the United States" appears as a defined term in Title 28 of the U.S. Code and has been interpreted in decisions addressing whether a particular tribunal qualifies for specific procedural rules, removal jurisdiction, and habeas corpus statutes. Researchers working on jurisdiction questions should check how the specific statute at issue defines the term, not assume the constitutional definition controls.
Historical Dictionary Support
The two editions of Black's Law Dictionary reproduced here reveal the institutional evolution plainly. The first edition's enumeration includes the circuit courts as a separate entry, reflecting the pre-1911 structure. The second edition drops the original circuit courts and adds the court of private land claims (created by the Court of Private Land Claims Act of 1891 and dissolved in 1904) and the customs court — an enumeration that reflects the reshaping of the federal docket around the turn of the twentieth century.
Both editions list the Senate sitting as a court of impeachment at the top of the enumeration, a choice that has since fallen away from standard usage. Modern definitions of "courts of the United States" in federal statutes do not include the Senate's impeachment function, and scholars uniformly treat that function as distinct from Article III judicial power.
Anderson's Dictionary of Law takes the more constitutionally grounded approach, quoting Article III directly and framing the definition around the delegation of judicial power rather than the institutional roster. This is methodologically sounder for constitutional analysis, though less immediately useful for identifying which specific courts existed at a given time.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the rise of Article I courts, the modern administrative state's quasi-judicial agencies, and the question — extensively litigated in the twentieth century — of when congressional assignment of adjudicatory functions to non-Article III bodies exceeds constitutional limits. These developments require sources beyond the dictionary shelf.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is inherently federal. State courts are never "courts of the United States" in the Article III sense, though state courts may exercise concurrent jurisdiction over some federal claims and may be bound by federal law. For questions about whether a particular state tribunal qualifies as a "court of the United States" under a specific federal statute, the statute's own definitions section and relevant case law interpreting that statute govern.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Constitutional Law Encyclopedia: Birthright Citizenship — The Fourteenth Amendment and United States v. Wong Kim Ark (constitutional_136) — relevant for understanding the relationship between federal judicial power and the constitutional framework within which courts of the United States operate.