What’s the difference between a trial court and a court of first instance?
<p>In a recent discussion thread one was defined as apparently rather nearly the same thing as the other prompting me to ask what is the difference between them.</p>

<h2>They are synonyms</h2>
<p>A trial court or a court of first instance is the first court where a matter is tried. This is in contrast to an appellate court which is where appeals from trials are heard.</p>
<p>Note that some courts are one, some are the other, some do both, and some are the same people with different “hats”.</p>

<p>Court of first instance is a slightly more generic term and is more often used in civil law, while trial court is a term more often used in common law forums, in part, because common law courts tend to have a single compact trial rather than a series of smaller evidentiary hearings in civil cases.</p>
<p>I used the term &quot;court of first instance&quot; in a comment on the theory that you might be unfamiliar with the term &quot;trial court&quot; which most common law jurisdiction residents are familiar with because you might have a civil law legal system background.</p>

<p>&quot;Court of first instance&quot; is a broad term that includes trial courts. As long as the court is the matter's entry point into the judicial system, it is the court of first instance for that matter. So, the term &quot;court of first instance&quot; or &quot;judge of first instance&quot; also includes judicial entities settling a matter other than via a trial. A court of first instance might be conducting a judicial review (which is a hearing, not a trial), or hearing an application for various forms of statutory relief or declarations (again, these are hearings, not trials). It happens that most of these non-trial first-instance hearings are handled by the very same courts and judges that hold first-instance trials, so there would generally be no practical confusion if you did not use the terms with this kind of precision.</p>
<p>Here is some example language showing the usage in these other contexts:</p>
<ul>
<li>&quot;<a href="https://canlii.ca/t/gk0rk#par40" rel="nofollow noreferrer">This Court held that the judge at first instance had erred in entertaining the judicial review application because he failed to exercise his discretion on relevant grounds...</a>&quot;</li>
<li>&quot;<a href="https://canlii.ca/t/1tvvg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">the learned judge of first instance had granted a mandamus requiring the respondents to issue a building permit upon an application made by the appellant</a>&quot;</li>
</ul>

legal-terms appeal first-instance