The space where judging is done is called a court.
A court is a court of a single judge or a board of judges who attend with the objective of rendering a sentence . The term, by extension, is used to name the place where it is judged . For example: "Tomorrow I have to go to court to testify for López's trial" , "The court determined that the accused was innocent and ordered his immediate release" , "The members of the court were threatened by the victims' relatives" .
Whoever wants to know the concept in depth, the first thing to do is to proceed to discover its etymological origin. Specifically, we have to say that this is found in Latin since it emanates from the verb iudicare , which can be translated as "dictate a verdict."
Types of court
Juzgado can be used as a synonym for court or court of justice . In this case, the court is a public body that resolves disputes under its jurisdiction. It may be a single-person court (the resolutions are issued by a single judge) or a collegiate court (a plurality of judges issue the resolutions).
Courts can also be distinguished between ordinary (they must respond to matters that occur in their jurisdiction, whatever their nature or actors), special (established by the Constitution to resolve certain particular matters or judge certain people) and arbitral (whose judges do not They are public officials).
According to the hierarchy, there are lower courts (they occupy the lowest level of the judicial pyramid) or higher courts (also called magistrates ). Regarding the procedural phase in which they intervene, on the other hand, we can speak of an investigative court (in charge of the preparatory proceedings for the trial) or a sentencing court (they hand down the sentence).
Another classification of courts refers to courts of common jurisdiction and courts of special jurisdiction , according to their scope of jurisdiction within the framework of current legislation.
There are different types of court.
Expressions with the term
In addition to all of the above, we cannot ignore the existence of a colloquial expression that is frequently used in Spanish regions and that includes the term that we are now analyzing. This is the adjectival phrase "court on duty" . What it is trying to express is that a fact or comment is intolerable, scandalous and absolutely inadmissible.
An example of the use of that is the following sentence: «The statements of the bank director about having to work more and earn less to get out of the crisis are a court of call, both because of the misery that many families are experiencing and because he has been accused of tax fraud .
Curiously, it should be noted that one of the most significant television series of the 90s was titled "Court on Duty" . This was a comedy that told of the peculiar situations that occurred every night in a Manhattan courthouse.