South Carolina Circuit Court
U.S. state court
The South Carolina Circuit Court is the state court of general jurisdiction of the U.S. state of South Carolina. It consists of a civil division (the Court of Common Pleas) and a criminal division (the Court of General Sessions).
The Circuit Court is the state trial court of general jurisdiction in South Carolina. It is also a superior court, having limited appellate jurisdiction over appeals from the lower Probate Court, Magistrate's Court, and Municipal Court.
South Carolina's 46 counties are divided into 16 judicial circuits:
First Circuit – Calhoun, Orangeburg, Dorchester
Second Circuit – Aiken, Barnwell, Bamberg
Third Circuit – Lee, Sumter, Clarendon, Williamsburg
Fourth Circuit – Dillon, Chesterfield, Darlington, Marlboro
Fifth Circuit – Kershaw, Richland
Sixth Circuit – Chester, Fairfield, Lancaster
Seventh Circuit – Cherokee, Spartanburg
Eighth Circuit – Abbeville, Newberry, Laurens, Greenwood
Ninth Circuit – Berkeley, Charleston
Tenth Circuit – Oconee, Anderson
Eleventh Circuit – McCormick, Edgefield, Lexington, Saluda
Twelfth Circuit – Florence, Marion
Thirteenth Circuit – Pickens, Greenville
Fourteenth Circuit – Allendale, Colleton, Hampton, Beaufort, Jasper
Fifteenth Circuit – Georgetown, Horry
Sixteenth Circuit – York, Union
Each has at least one resident circuit judge who maintains an office in their home county within the circuit. There are currently 49 circuit judges who serve the 16 circuits on a rotating basis. Court terms and assignments determined by the Chief Justice based upon recommendations of Court Administration. Circuit court judges are elected by the South Carolina General Assembly to staggered terms of six years.
South Carolina has a statewide business court program within the circuit courts. This began as a pilot program in a limited number of circuits, created by a South Carolina Supreme Court administrative order in 2007, which the Supreme Court expanded statewide in 2014, and later made permanent in 2019.
“South Carolina Circuit Court” enters the record as u.S. state court. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what South, Carolina and Circuit can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7566562. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2007, 2014 and 2019.
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This entry incorporates text from “South Carolina Circuit Court” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.