It is concerned with political matters, including the powers, rights, capacities, and dudes of various levels of government and government officials. Public law includes regulatory statutes, penal law and other law of public order.

As opposed to public law that refers to an act that deals with society as a whole and involves interrelations between the state and the g?^ncral population, a private law concerns private individual rights, dudes, and liabilities, and involves interactions between private citizens. Generally speaking, private law is the area of law in a society that ailccts the relationships between individuals or groups without the intervention of the state or government. When Congress acts to aid a specific individual, family, or other small group, it passes a private law. Private law includes contract law，property law, family law, labor law, etc.

What is worth notice is that the distinction between what is public and what is private in the law is often a hazy one. Many consumer protection laws arc of a public law nature, which limits the ability of companies to engage in transactions that fail to rcspea the rights of consumers. Most laws that impose criminal penalties are considered public law, as these laws are intended to protect all members of society.

As important participants in the American legal system, judges are often looked upon by most people as the symbol and keeper of justice. Now, tens of thousand of people serve as judges in the United States. Judges may fall into two major categories according to the stage of a case they work on: trial court judgies and appellate judges. Trial court judges preside over trials, usually from beginning to end. They decide pretrial motions, define the scope of discovery, set the trial schedule, rule on oral motions during trial, control the behavior of participants and the pace of the trial, advise the jury of the law in a jury trial, and sentence a guilty defendant in a criminal case. Apellate judges hear appeals from decisions of the trial courts. They review trial court records, read briefs submitted by the parties, and listen to oral arguments by attorneys, and then decide whether error or injustice occurred in the trial.

Judges can also be distinguished according to their jurisdiction. For example, federal court judges differ from state court judges. They operate in different courtrooms, and they hear difFerent types of cases. A federal court judge hears cases that fall within federal jurisdiction. Generally, this means cases that involve a question of federal law or the U.S. Constitution, involve parties from different states, or name the United States as a party. State court judges hear cases involving state lawf and they also have jurisdiction over many federal cases.

Some judges can hear only certain cases in special courts with limited subject matter jurisdiction. For example, a federal bankruptcy court judg^ may preside over only bankruptcy cases. Other special courts with limited subject matter jurisdiction include tax, probate, juvenile, and traffic courts.

American judges enjoy high prestige and respect. In the United States, a judge is addressed as “Your Honor” when presiding over the court. Justices make up the upper echelon of appellate judges. (The term justice generally describes judges serving on the hi^iest court in a jurisdiction. In some jurisdictions a justicc may be any appellate judge.) Subordinate or inferior jurisdiction judges in U.S. legal system are sometimes called magistrates or magistrate judges.

On the federal level, judges have lifetime tenure. The Constitution safeguards judicial independence by providing that federal judges shall hold office “during good behavior”； in practice, this usually means they serve until they die, retire, or resign. And there is no mandatory retirement age for justices and judges on the federal level.

Most state court judges, on the other hand，hold their office for a specified number of years. In some states a judge's term is fixed by statute. In some other states, if a judg^ is appointed by the governor, the judge’s term may be established by the governor. All state jurisdictions have a mandatory retirement age.