I do hope that everyone understands that a court does not get it's jurisdictional authority from the flag that is posted.!!!
courts of inferior or limited jurisdiction get their authority from one source and only one source. Pleadings sufficient to empower the
court to act meaning one of the parties must give the court it's power to act by way of written and oral argument (the parties, and not
their attorneys must do this!)

We have a common law court system.
There are two basic forms of law in the world. code law and common law. Code law means that the law as written is the law.
Unfortunately, code has to be continually expanded by legislative authority. The so called Internal Revenue Service Code is an
attempt to impose code law over common law. The results are disasters. Common law means that you can't read any statute, rule
or law for that matter any constitutional article and tell what it means on it's face.

A common law system means that what any stature, rule, law, or constitutional law means is determined by the highest court of
competent jurisdiction in their most recent ruling. In America, only Louisiana uses a code law system.

Development of the common-law court system in America.

The Supreme Court is a common-law court that operates in a system that has little "federal common law."
Yet it's common-law nature is important to the court's functioning as a constitutional arbiter.

In common law, the substance of the law is to be found in the published reports of court decisions.
Two points are critical to the workings of a common-law system. First, law emerges only through litigation about actual controversies.
Second, precedent guides courts: holdings in a case must follow previous rulings, if the facts are identical. This is the principle of
stare decisis. But subsequent cases can also change the law. If the facts of a new case are distinguishable, a new rule can emerge.

And sometimes, if the grounds of a precedent are seen to be wrong, the holding can be overruled by later courts.

When the Constitution was drafted, American society was infused with common-law ideas. Common law originated in the medieval
English royal courts. By 1776, it had been received in all the British colonies. The revolutionary experience heightened Americans'
adherence to common-law, especially to the idea that the principle embodied in the common law controlled the government.
While there is no express provision in the Constitution stating that the Supreme Court is a common-law court, Article III divides the
jurisdiction of federal courts into law (meaning common law), equity, and admiralty.

The Philadelphia Convention of 1787 rejected language that would limit federal jurisdiction to matter controlled by congressional
statute. Thus the Constitution implicitly recognizes the Supeme Court as a common-law court, as does the Seventh Amendment
in the Bill of Rights.

The Constitution left open the question whether there was a federal common law. The Supreme Court first held, in United States v.
Hudson and Goodwin (1812) that there is no federal common law of crimes, and then in Wheaton v. Peters (1834), that there is
no federal civil common law. But in Swift v. Tyson (1842), the Court permitted lower federal court to decide commercial law
questions on the basis of "the general principles and doctrines of commercial jurisprudence" thus opening the door to later growth
of a general federal common law. A century later, the Court put a stop to this development in Erie Railroad v. Thompkins (1938)
by declaring Swift unconstitutional. (Yet, at the same time, it acknowledged the existence of bodies of specialized federal common
law, such as, for example, it refuses to render advisory opinions, waiting instead for litigants to bring issues before it.

Precedent shapes the Court's power of judicial review' because of it, any ruling of the Court is a precedent for similar cases. Thus if
one state's law is held unconstitutional, all similar statutes in other states are unconstitutional a point the Court was obliged to
underscore forcibly in Cooper v. Aaron (1958) in the face of intransigent southern resistance to the Court's holding in Brown v.
Board o Education (1954)



Creditwrench™ has lots and lots of resources available for you to learn how to
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