The United States District Court for the District of Columbia is a federal district court in Washington, D.C. Along with the United States District Court for the District of Hawaii and the High Court of American Samoa, it also sometimes handles federal issues that arise in the territory of American Samoa, which has no local federal court or territorial court.

The United States district courts are the trial courts of the U.S. federal judiciary. There is one district court for each federal judicial district. Each district covers one U.S. state or a portion of a state. There is at least one federal courthouse in each district, and many districts have more than one. District court decisions are appealed to the U.S. court of appeals for the circuit in which they reside, except for certain specialized cases that are appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit or directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.