American Appeals: The Actors

The function of an appeal in the American system, in plain language, is to ask a higher court to review a lower court's action.

The actors

While a trial is the legal procedure usually looming largest in the popular imagination, the structure of an appeal is quite different. (The next post will discuss this in more detail.) For example, the names and roles of the parties change. Where the parties in the trial court are usually the plaintiff and defendant, the party that files an appeal is known as the "appellant" and the one defending the lower court decision is the "appellee" or "respondent." Sometimes these identifiers are combined with the parties' trial-level roles, e.g. "plaintiff-respondent" or "defendant-appellee," etc.

Notably, and again unlike a trial court, an appeal is not heard by only one judge but by a panel. Depending on the court, this panel may have anywhere between three judges and, in a hearing en banc, every judge of the court. (In the federal circuits, except the Ninth Circuit, this could be from six to 17 judges.) And while an appeals court has a multiplicity of judges, one thing you will not find there is a jury, whose role is limited to the trial court.