Venue (law)

Venue (law) is the location where a case is heard.

The perceived abuse of English criminal venue law was one of the enumerated grievances in the United States Declaration of Independence, which accused George III of the United Kingdom of "transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses."Article Three of the United States Constitution provides: "Trial of all Crimes . . . shall be held in the State where the said Crimes shall have been committed; but when not committed within any State, the Trial shall be at such Place or Places as the Congress may by Law have directed."

The "where the said Crimes shall have been committed" language refers to the locus delicti, and a single crime may often give rise to several constitutionally permissible venues. "[T]he locus delicti must be determined from the nature of the crime alleged and the location of the act or acts constituting it." Thus, venue may be constitutionally permissible even if an individual defendant was never personally present in the relevant state. For example, conspiracy may be prosecuted wherever the agreement occurred or wherever any overt act was committed.

For the purposes of constitutional venue, the boundaries of the states are questions of law to be determined by the judge, but the location of the crime is a question of fact to be determined by the jury.

The venue provision of Article III (regulating the location of the trial) is distinct from the Vicinage Clause of the Sixth Amendment (regulating the geography from which the jury pool is selected). The unit of the former is the state; the unit of the later is the state and judicial district. Unlike judicial districts under the Vicinage Clause, consistent with Article III, Congress may "provide a place of trial where none was provided when the offense was committed, or change the place of trial after the commission of the offense."

Venue is either a county (for cases in state court) or a district or division (for cases in federal court). Venue deals with locality of a lawsuit--that is, in which locale a lawsuit may be filed or commenced. It involves a decision of which district (federal court) or county (state court) is appropriate, based typically on where a matter occurred or where the defendant resides. A case can be brought only in a certain venue. For instance, in federal diversity cases, the venue can be only (1) the district where any defendant resides if all defendants reside in the same state (although corporations reside in any district that may exercise personal jurisdiction over them, according to 28 U.S.C. § 1391(b), (2) the district where a substantial part of the events giving rise to the claim occurred, or (3) the district in which any defendant is subject to personal jurisdiction if there is no district in which the claim can otherwise be brought (28 U.S.C. § 1391).

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