How Military Defense Counsel Works in a Court-Martial
A service member who learns that charges may be coming usually has one immediate worry beneath all the others: whether real legal help is available, and…
Uniform Code of Military Justice · Reference
Court Martial Guide
Reference index
29 guidesThe Rules for Courts-Martial: The Procedure Behind a Military Trial
When a service member learns that charges are coming, the question that follows is rarely about the substantive law. It is about sequence: what happens first,…
The Military Prosecutor: What Trial Counsel Does, and Its Limits
The lawyer who represents the government at a court-martial is called the trial counsel. It is tempting to picture this person as the military equivalent of…
Personal Jurisdiction: Who Is Subject to the UCMJ
The day a recruit is sworn in, a second body of criminal law switches on over that person's life, one that civilians never live under. The…
Arraignment in the Military Justice System: Charges, Pleas, and Forum
Arraignment is the shortest hearing in a court-martial and the one that locks the most decisions into place. It is often over in under an hour,…
DoD Directives in Military Justice: Titling, Indexing, and Law-of-War Duties
A service member can be cleared of any wrongdoing, never charged, never tried, and still carry the investigation with them for decades. The mechanism that makes…
Pretrial Motions in a Court-Martial: Suppression, Dismissal, and Discovery
Long before a panel hears a word of testimony, much of a court-martial has already been decided in writing. The pretrial motion is the instrument that…
Convening Authority: Who Sends a Case to Court-Martial, and Who No Longer Can
When a service member is accused of a crime under military law, no prosecutor and no grand jury decides whether the case goes to trial. For…
How Military Justice Was Reformed: The Acts of 1968, 1983, 2016, and 2019
A service member court-martialed in 2026 stands inside a system that looks almost nothing like the one the Uniform Code of Military Justice created in 1951.…
The Service Rules That Implement the UCMJ: AR 27-10, JAGMAN, and AFI 51-201
The Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Manual for Courts-Martial set one baseline for every armed service, yet a soldier, a sailor, a Marine, and…
Subject-Matter Jurisdiction: Which Offenses a Court-Martial Can Try
A soldier breaks into a house off post, on a weekend, in civilian clothes, and steals a stranger's property. The crime has nothing to do with…
AR 15-6 Investigations: How the Army Looks Into Misconduct Before Discipline
A soldier called in to "give a statement" about an incident often has no idea which of two very different things is happening. One is a…
The Uniform Code of Military Justice: The Law Every Service Member Lives Under
The moment a recruit takes the oath of enlistment, a second body of law settles over them, one that civilians never answer to. It governs not…
The Articles of War: American Military Law Before the UCMJ
A service member tried by court-martial today is judged under a federal statute that applies the same way in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps,…
Preferral of Charges: How Military Charges Are Brought on the DD Form 458
The moment a service member stops being someone a command is "looking into" and becomes a formally accused person has a name: preferral. It is not…
What Happens Before a Court-Martial: The Pretrial Stages Explained
By the time a service member sits down at the defense table for arraignment, the case has already moved through a chain of decisions that took…
Article 31 Rights: Military Self-Incrimination Protections, and How They Differ from Miranda
Most Americans picture the warning a police officer reads after an arrest: the right to remain silent, the right to a lawyer, the caution that anything…
After a Court-Martial Conviction: Post-Trial Review and the Appeals Path
A guilty verdict at a court-martial is not the last word, and the steps that follow are easy to misunderstand because the system was rebuilt twice…
The UCMJ as Federal Statute: Title 10, Sections 801 to 946a
People refer to the Uniform Code of Military Justice as if it were a freestanding book, but it is something more precise: a single chapter of…
Who Is Who in a Court-Martial: The Roles That Decide a Case
A court-martial gathers a dozen different people in one room, and a service member trying to understand what is happening to them quickly runs into a…
NATO SOFA Jurisdiction: Who Prosecutes a U.S. Service Member Overseas
When a U.S. service member is accused of an offense in a NATO host country, the first practical question is rarely about guilt. It is about…
How a Court-Martial Panel Is Chosen: Voir Dire and Member Selection
A service member who elects trial by panel does not face a jury drawn from a community by lottery. The people who will decide guilt are…
The Military Rules of Evidence: What a Court-Martial Will and Will Not Hear
A court-martial is decided less by what happened than by what the panel is permitted to learn about what happened. A confession exists or it does…
The Staff Judge Advocate: The Commander’s Lawyer in Military Justice
A service member facing a court-martial will hear about three lawyers, and it is easy to confuse them. There is the defense counsel, who is on…
The Manual for Courts-Martial: How the UCMJ Is Put Into Practice
A service member who reads the Uniform Code of Military Justice looking for the rule that decides a case soon discovers that the statute alone does…