Ecclesiastical court

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages) This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Ecclesiastical court" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (November 2013) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article possibly contains original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. (January 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

In organized Christianity, an ecclesiastical court, also called court Christian or court spiritual, is any of certain non-adversarial courts conducted by church-approved officials having jurisdiction mainly in spiritual or religious matters. Historically, they interpret or apply canon law. One of its primary bases was the Corpus Juris Civilis of Justinian, which is also considered the source of the civil law legal tradition.

In the United Kingdom, secular courts that took over the functions of the ecclesiastic courts, e.g. in family law, are still known as courts ecclesiastical as distinct from courts temporal.^[1]