Supreme Court of the United States

The Supreme Court of the United States is the most authoritative court of the US federal government and the highest body of the government's judicial branch. It is responsible for interpreting laws to ensure that they abide by the stipulations of the US Constitution.

The court hears primarily appellate cases, or those brought to it by parties from lower federal courts or state courts. These cases are almost always of a legally controversial nature, related to the constitutionality of laws as interpreted by lower courts. Only people who can prove that the unconstitutional interpretation of a law has injured them in some way can bring their cases to the Supreme Court. The court's rulings on these matters almost always result in real changes to the American legal system, as the court does not issue simple advisory opinions. The Supreme Court's decisions are final. They must be obeyed and cannot be appealed to any other court.

Article III of the Constitution provides for the creation of the Supreme Court. It states that the court possesses authority over all other courts of the federal government's judicial branch. In one of its first acts as the country's new legislature, the US Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1789, which actually formed the Supreme Court. The body was initially composed of one chief justice and five associate justices. The number of justices fluctuated over time, with Congress reaching a standard of nine total justices in the late nineteenth century. The president of the United States appoints these justices, who serve on the court until they retire, die, or are impeached.

Through its numerous landmark decisions since 1789, the Supreme Court has become one of the most influential institutions in US politics and society. In this way it exercises great power over the direction of American life. The court has reflected different political leanings throughout its history, at turns supporting conservative or progressive views.

Background

Article III of the Constitution authorizes Congress to create the Supreme Court as the highest body of the judicial branch of government. This branch was to be composed of many lower federal courts, but the Supreme Court would hold ultimate legal authority. The only other stipulations Article III names in relation to the Supreme Court are that its justices are to be compensated for their services and that this compensation cannot be decreased during their tenure.

This left Congress with the responsibility of organizing the Supreme Court and the rest of the government's judicial branch. Therefore, Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1789. The act created the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts. The Supreme Court had six justices at first, a chief justice and five associates. President George Washington nominated John Jay to serve as the first chief justice of the Supreme Court.

As the body was intended always to meet in the capital of the United States, the Supreme Court convened for the first time at the Royal Exchange building in New York City, then the US capital city. The court moved to the new national capital of Philadelphia in 1790 and finally to the permanent capital of Washington, DC, in 1800. The Supreme Court had not been granted a building of its own, and it was placed in the recently completed US Capitol Building, where Congress assembled.

The Supreme Court continued to meet in various rooms of the US Capitol Building into the early twentieth century. In 1860, the court moved into the room later known as the Old Senate Chamber. The court remained there into the 1930s. In 1929, Supreme Court chief justice and former US president William Howard Taft requested that Congress fund the construction of a new building specifically to house the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court Building was completed in 1935. Its marble façade recalls classical Roman temples, with Corinthian columns holding up the ornate triangular roof. The building's grandiose design was intended to symbolize the important position of the court as a hallmark of justice in the American republic. The Supreme Court continued to convene in this building into the twenty-first century.

Procedure

The Supreme Court has maintained a certain level of decorum since its founding in 1789, despite the numerous changes to which it has been subjected. One Supreme Court tradition is the manner in which the body decides which cases to review. As the highest court in the United States, the Supreme Court is highly discriminatory in its selection of cases. The court generally receives about 7,500 case requests a year but agrees to review only about 150. Of these, the court may accept only between 70 and 80 for actual oral argument; the justices decide the remaining cases after simply reviewing them independently. This great disparity of numbers is due to the fact that the court reviews only those cases judged important enough to earn its attention. The court usually takes cases on which two or more lower federal courts have disagreed. As per tradition, at least four of the nine justices must agree to hear a case before the court accepts it.

Supreme Court justices wear black robes while working in the court. The nine justices typically shake hands with one another at the start of a court session as a sign that they all work toward the same goal despite their major political and philosophical differences. When the justices finally take the bench, they sit according to seniority. The chief justice sits in the middle, the longest-serving associate justice sits to the right, and the second-longest-serving associate justice sits to the left. The other justices sit according to this pattern.

The Supreme Court has its own way of hearing cases. Unlike many other courts, the Supreme Court usually does not feature juries. First the court agrees to hear a case. The justices then review legal briefs from each involved party. Legal briefs are written documents in which parties argue their points to the justices. The court then hears oral arguments from the case's parties. This is an important aspect of the Supreme Court's process because the justices are able to question the parties for clarification.

Following the argumentation phase, the nine justices retire to confer with one another on the case. The justices frequently spend months doing this. The justices then present their opinions on the case to one another. The majority opinion becomes the official decision of the court. If the court has an even number of justices for any reason, and the justices tie their votes, the decision of the lower court that preceded the Supreme Court appeal becomes the law. The Supreme Court publicly issues its decisions alongside any of the justices' dissenting opinions. This dissent allows the American public to see how the justices differed philosophically in interpreting the legal points in question.

The president of the United States nominates new Supreme Court justices when a vacancy opens due to a justice's death or retirement. The president may choose anyone as a justice, as the Constitution does not name specific requirements for nominees. Presidents usually nominate judges from lower federal courts. After being confirmed by a vote in the US Senate, the nominees become Supreme Court justices for life. However, justices can be impeached for unethical behavior while on the court. The Senate must convict the justices before they can be removed from the bench.

By the early twenty-first century, the average length of service for a Supreme Court justice was sixteen years. Associate justice William O. Douglas set a record for the longest tenure, serving for over thirty-six and seven months before retiring in 1975. The longest serving chief justice was John Marshall, in office from 1801 to 1835. Other notable justices included Thurgood Marshall, who became the first African American Supreme Court justice in 1967 and served until 1991. In 1981, Sandra Day O'Connor made history as the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court. In 2009, Sonia Sotomayor became the first justice of Hispanic heritage, and in 2022, Ketanji Brown Jackson became the first Black woman confirmed to the court.

Major Cases

The Supreme Court began hearing cases in 1791. In these early years, the justices were required to travel to various federal judicial districts throughout the country—which they found irritating—and to hold circuit court twice a year. This tradition continued into the late nineteenth century. Despite these frustrations, the Supreme Court maintained its position as an important arbiter of issues related to the Constitution and the federal government.

One of the first noteworthy cases the court decided was Marbury v. Madison in 1803. In this case, President John Adams named a number of individuals to federal court positions just before leaving office in 1801. The commissions for these appointments were not all delivered before President Thomas Jefferson took office. Jefferson directed his secretary of state, James Madison, not to deliver the remaining commissions. However, William Marbury, one of Adams's appointments, and several others sued Madison to receive their commissions, citing part of the Judiciary Act that allowed the Supreme Court to order that they be delivered. The Supreme Court ruled against Marbury, claiming that part of the act actually conflicted with Article III of the Constitution. The court did not have the authority to order Marbury's commission to be delivered, and Marbury lost the case. Marbury v. Madison, decided under Chief Justice John Marshall, marked the first time the Supreme Court had used its power to declare a congressional act unconstitutional.

Over the ensuing decades, the Supreme Court remained one of the most important federal bodies in settling national legal controversies in the United States. Some court decisions had momentous consequences for the American people as a whole. The court's 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford ruling involved one of the chief concerns of Americans at that time—the issue of slavery. Dred Scott was an enslaved man who sued for his freedom based on the fact that he had been a resident of the free Wisconsin territory. The court ruled against Scott, claiming that enslaved people were not citizens of the United States and therefore were not protected under the Constitution. The ongoing dispute over slavery and the proper legal treatment of African Americans resulted in the Civil War (1861–65), after which the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery and the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to those born in the United States. This made African Americans US citizens, showing how Supreme Court decisions could sometimes be overturned outside the court.

The Supreme Court continued to define aspects of the American political and cultural landscape through its rulings in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. One monumental Supreme Court decision was 1954's Brown v. Board of Education, which ended racial segregation in public schools throughout the United States. Prior to this, many public schools around the country, mostly in the South, accepted only White students, which forced Black Americans to attend their own schools. Separate cases brought against the enforcement of school segregation in various states were presented to the Supreme Court under the namesake of Linda Brown, a Kansas third grader who had been turned away from a White school near her home and forced to attend a Black school farther away. All nine justices of the court ruled in favor of Brown in 1954. They asserted that segregating Americans based on their race violated the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed equal protection of the law to all Americans. Public schools desegregated following Brown v. Board of Education.

Another high-profile decision with complex, lasting impacts on American society was Roe v. Wade (1973). The case involved a woman in Texas who wanted to obtain an abortion but was barred from doing so by a state law. The Supreme Court ruled that the right to privacy guaranteed in the Constitution allowed women to choose to have abortions nationwide. Proponents held that Roe v. Wade greatly enhanced women's rights, but the case also galvanized a strong anti-abortion movement that became an influential force in conservative politics over the following decades. Then, after undergoing a significant conservative shift in the early twenty-first century, the Supreme Court decision overturned Roe v. Wade in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), holding that abortion was not in fact a constitutional or fundamental right. The conservative majority's reasoning in Dobbs proved especially controversial as many legal scholars noted that it could prompt a reassessment of longstanding precedents from many other prominent cases, potentially allowing states to crack down on various rights that had not been codified, such as the use of contraceptives.

The Supreme Court also prominently ruled on the issue of LGBTQ rights during the twenty-first century. One landmark case came in 2015, when the court decided in Obergefell v. Hodges that state bans on marriages for same-sex couples were unconstitutional, and that all fifty states must legally recognize marriage for same-sex couples. Supporters of LGBTQ rights gained another historic victory in June 2020 with the Supreme Court ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County. In a 6–3 decision, the court ruled that the prohibition of discrimination based on sex under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 extended to sexual orientation and gender identity. The case established strong legal precedent for equal rights for LGBTQ employees.

Expanding the Court

The US Constitution does not specify the size or makeup of the Supreme Court, a fact that led to early instability in the number of justices and continues to occasionally generate controversy. The body began with six justices, but the number fluctuated several times for political reasons before settling on nine in the late 1860s. Over the decades the nine-justice court became widely accepted as standard. However, because there is no legal reason preventing more justices from being added, some political thinkers have at times advocated for expanding the court. Generally this is proposed as a way for a president to appoint judges who are likely to be more sympathetic to their ideology or legislation.

One of the most famous proposals for expanding the Supreme Court came from President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937. He supported a law that would have added a new justice to the court any time a sitting justice over the age of seventy refused to retire, with a maximum of fifteen total justices. Though framed as a way to ease the workload on older justices, the so-called court packing proposal was widely criticized as a way to ensure Supreme Court approval of Roosevelt's New Deal policies. Ultimately, the bill was blocked by Congress.

The idea of court packing returned to public attention around the 2020 presidential election, which was marked by stark partisan political tensions. Some Democrats suggested it might be a valid option if their party won the presidency and control of Congress. Support for court expansion was largely a response to the actions of Republican senators, who had blocked Democratic president Barack Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016, arguing that the winner of the 2016 presidential election should make the appointment. When Republican Donald Trump won the presidency, he was able to appoint Justice Neil Gorsuch, maintaining the conservative wing of the court. However, when liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died just before the 2020 election, Republicans made the opposite argument, stating that Trump should be able to fill her seat immediately, whether he ultimately won reelection or not. The Senate confirmation of Trump's nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, was completed with unprecedented speed by the end of October 2020. Many liberals felt the Republicans had effectively "stolen" at least one Supreme Court seat, and that therefore expansion should be considered as a way to depoliticize a court that had been artificially skewed conservative.

After Democrat Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election and Democrats took control of both chambers of Congress, attention continued to be focused on the prospect of court expansion. In April 2021, Biden issued an executive order establishing a Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. The commission was tasked with evaluating the Supreme Court's role and operations as well as arguments around potential reforms. The requested report was released that December and included a history of Supreme Court reform efforts as well as analysis of the increased partisanship around nominations and confirmations. The commission noted that proponents of expanding the court often considered it a way to respond to violations of institutional norms, safeguard democracy, and strengthen the court, while those against expansion saw it as a threat to judicial independence and the court's legitimacy. The report also examined other potential reforms such as rotating or panel justices, systems of partisan balance, term limits for justices, restricting the court's jurisdiction, enabling legislative overrides of the court's decisions, having justices adopt a code of conduct, and increasing the court's transparency. Overall, the commission offered mostly context and did not come down on one side or the other for several of the proposals. It did acknowledge the constitutionality of court expansion, while advocating for some suggestions such as transparency changes and the ethics code. Therefore, the report itself was the subject of much debate following its release.

Despite growing support for expanding the Supreme Court, many moderates remained reluctant to support the idea. Some suggested it could undermine the stability of the court, with the size changing with each new presidential administration. Critics noted how court packing had been used in other countries by elected leaders to weaken the opposition and install themselves as autocrats. Yet supporters countered that the strategy remained a legal last resort to counter other erosions of democratic norms.

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