This week Craig Benzine is going to talk about the structure of the U.S. court system and how exactly it manages to keep things moving smoothly. We’’ll talk about trial courts, district courts, appeals courts, circuit courts, state supreme courts, and of course the one at the top - the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s all quite a bit to manage with jurisdictions and such, but it's important to remember that the vast majority of cases never even make it to court! Most are settled out of court, but also terms like mootness and ripeness are used to throw cases out altogether. Today, we're going to focus on how cases make it to the top, and next week we’ll talk about what happens when they get there. Produced in collaboration with PBS Digital Studios: youtube.com/pbsdigitalstudios Support is provided by Voqal: www.voqal.org All Flickr.com images are licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 2.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode Want to find Crash Course elsewhere on the internet? Facebook - www.facebook.com/YouTubeCrashCourse Twitter - www.twitter.com/TheCrashCourse Tumblr - thecrashcourse.tumblr.com Support Crash Course on Patreon: patreon.com/crashcourse CC Kids: www.youtube.com/crashcoursekids