- published: 31 Mar 2016
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A supreme court is the highest court within the hierarchy of many legal jurisdictions. Other descriptions for such courts include court of last resort, instance court, judgment court, apex court, and highest court of appeal. Broadly speaking, the decisions of a supreme court are not subject to further review by any other court.
In a few places, the court named the "Supreme Court" is not in fact the highest court; examples include the Supreme Court of the State of New York and the former Supreme Court of Judicature of England and Wales. Conversely, the highest court in some jurisdictions is not named the "Supreme Court"; for example, the High Court of Australia.
Supreme courts typically function primarily as appellate courts, hearing appeals from decisions of lower trial courts, or from intermediate-level appellate courts.
Some countries have multiple "supreme courts" whose respective jurisdictions have different geographical extents, or which are restricted to particular areas of law. In particular, countries with a federal system of government typically have both a federal supreme court (such as the Supreme Court of the United States), and supreme courts for each member state (such as the Supreme Court of Nevada), with the former having jurisdiction over the latter only to the extent that the federal constitution extends federal law over state law; the US states of Texas and Oklahoma also split the functions of a supreme court between separate courts for criminal and civil cases. Jurisdictions with a civil law system often have a hierarchy of administrative courts separate from the ordinary courts, headed by a supreme administrative court. A number of jurisdictions also follow the "Austrian" model of a separate constitutional court (first developed in the Czechoslovak Constitution of 1920).