The Constitution and federal statutes divide the Supreme Court's jurisdiction into two main categories: original jurisdiction (the power to hear cases as an initial matter) and appellate jurisdiction (the power to hear cases on appeal from lower federal courts or from state courts). The original jurisdiction, which includes suits between states and actions against ambassadors, is rarely invoked. Cases heard in original jurisdiction come to the Court directly, and its decision is beyond further appeal. While original jurisdiction now consumes a small fraction of the Court's time and resources, it is still part of the Court's regular business. The Court hears between one and five original cases each year, partly to avoid allowing its original jurisdiction to fall into desuetude but mostly because of the need to decide real controversies between states, usually over boundary disputes.
The most momentous case ever decided by the Supreme Court, Marbury v. Madison (1803), which established the Court's power of constitutional review over acts of Congress, was a case that came to the Court in original jurisdiction.
However, it is the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court that is central to its modern function in the American legal and constitutional system. Until recent times, appeals to the Court were of two types: “mandatory appeals” (also called “appeals by right”) and “discretionary appeals.” Mandatory appeals were appeals from lower federal court decisions or from high state appeals courts that the Supreme Court was required by statute to hear if certain factors were present in the lower court's decisions. However, as the caseload of the High Court continued to grow, this avenue of appeal came under increasing criticism especially from members of the Court itself. Many mandatory appeals raised inconsequential issues that wasted the Court's valuable time. These were often disposed of summarily and, therefore, had little precedential value for the development of the law. As a result, in 1988 Congress enacted reform legislation that essentially gave to the Court virtually complete control over its own docket so that today most cases come to the Court through the avenue of discretionary appeals via a writ of certiorari (or “cert”). The Court receives nearly eight thousand cert petitions each year. If at least four of the nine Supreme Court justices believe a case merits hearing, the Court will “grant cert” and schedule the case for full briefing and oral argument. The decision whether to grant or deny a cert petition is wholly discretionary with special attention given to resolving conflicts among the federal courts of appeals, federal district courts, and/or state courts on important legal principles or issues of federal law.
In recent years, partly as a result of these changes, the Court now decides fewer than one hundred cases each term. If the Court declines to hear a case (“cert denied”), the rule is that the lower court decision is allowed to stand but denial of cert is not to be interpreted as having been approved by the Supreme Court; it has no precedential value beyond the jurisdiction of the lower court itself.
Direct appeals of district court decisions have become less frequent than in the past. They usually now occur only in matters where such direct review is required by statute in special areas such as those covered by the federal Voting Rights Act. In extremely rare cases, a United States court of appeals may certify an issue of great public importance for immediate review by the Supreme Court. Consideration of certified questions of this kind is mandatory, but a variety of technical grounds allow the court to dismiss the certification as improper. Unlike appeals and cert petitions, the circuit court alone, and not the parties, decides when an issue deserves to be certified.
While we normally associate the Supreme Court with constitutional adjudication, it is important to recognize that the Court plays an equally important role as the final avenue of appeal in cases of federal statutory interpretation. Thus, while the Court's constitutional decisions are beyond further review and can only be modified by an amendment to the Constitution—a process that has occurred fewer than half a dozen times in American history—statutory decisions are subject to review and modification by Congress. For example, if the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) decides that carbon dioxide is a polluting gas subject to regulation under the federal Clean Air Act, and the issue is then appealed, were the Court to decide that the EPA wrongly interpreted the act, Congress has the power to override the Court's decision by amending the act to include carbon dioxide as a pollutant.
The other major category of cases considered by the Supreme Court under its appellate jurisdiction consists of state court decisions. Although the Constitution does not expressly grant the Supreme Court the power to review state court decisions, from the birth of the republic many believed that such oversight was necessary to ensure the supremacy and uniformity of federal law. This power, which potentially threatens federal court domination over the states, has been strictly circumscribed to accommodate dictates of federalism. Statutes limit review of state court decisions to federal questions decided in final judgments of the state's highest state tribunal. Additionally, if a state decision is sustained by adequate nonfederal grounds—that is, if the result is entirely supportable on the basis of purely state‐law holdings adopted by the state court—under the doctrine of “adequate and independent state grounds” the Supreme Court may not hear the case even to review any federal‐law determination. If it is unclear which basis the state court relied upon, the Court will assume that the decision turned on federal law and may assert jurisdiction. These requirement ensure that scarce federal judicial resources are not spent in issuing essentially advisory opinions. It also makes clear that in matters of pure state law, the Supreme Court is not higher than any state's highest appellate court.
In exercising its appellate powers, the Court has subjected itself to a number of internal constraints. Article III declares that the federal courts will only hear “cases and controversies.” The Court has interpreted this language to require that the federal courts will only consider real legal disputes. This approach has given rise to a number of so‐called doctrines of justiciability—such as the requirement that parties to lawsuits have “standing,” that cases must be “ripe” and not “moot,” and that the courts will not, in their discretion, decide nonjusticiable political questions, or offer “advisory opinions”—for example, to the Congress when it is considering the constitutionality of proposed legislation. In addition to these internal constraints, from time to time the Court has had to confront external political forces that threatened to curb its appellate powers. The most famous example of this was President Franklin D. Roosevelt's plan in 1937 to pack the Court with justices that would rule more favorably on New Deal legislation. In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, proposals were made in Congress to curb the Court's power to hear cases involving
See also Judicial Review.
Bibliography
- Roger L. Stern, Eugene Gressman, Stephen M. Shapiro, and Kenneth S. Geller, Supreme Court Practice,
8th ed. (2002)
— Irving R. Kaufman;
