Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index The phrase lower court has several possible meanings in English: In reference to an appeal, the lower court is the court whose decision is being reviewed. The lower court, in this relative sense, may be a trial court or may itself be an appellate court that is lower in rank than the reviewing court. In an absolute sense, lower court refers to a trial court as opposed to an appellate court. As among trial courts, a lower court is a court of limited jurisdiction, especially one that is limited to hearing minor offenses or small civil disputes, as opposed to a superior court. This is a disambiguation page; that is, one that just points to other pages that might otherwise have the same name. If you followed a link here, you might want to go back and fix that link to point to the appropriate specific page. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.