In the last two hundred years, the mechanisms by which cases come to the Supreme Court have changed substantially. The Court has evolved from a court of obligatory appellate jurisdiction to a court of virtually complete discretionary jurisdiction. No longer can we speak of taking a case all the way to the Supreme Court; few cases fit within the Court's obligatory jurisdiction. Indeed, the Court's obligatory jurisdiction has been shrinking since the end of the nineteenth century.
From 1789 through 1891, virtually all cases came to the Court by a writ of error. The writ of error permitted the Court to review questions of law but not of fact. It was available to all parties whose cases fell within appellate jurisdiction of the Court. By the middle 1880s, as a result of the open‐ended character of the writ of error, the caseload of the Court had grown at an alarming pace; the justices faced a large and growing backlog. To deal with this crisis, Congress in 1891 created the circuit courts of appeals and added a discretionary writ of certiorari in certain cases. Thereafter, Congress incrementally expanded the Court's certiorari jurisdiction.
Despite these legislative actions, the caseload of the Court continued to mount, so Congress enacted the Judiciary Act of 1925, which eliminated most, but not all, obligatory jurisdiction. Subsequently, about 95 percent of the Court's cases came up on a writ of certiorari. In the 1970s, once again under the pressure of growing caseloads, Congress chipped away at the Court's remaining obligatory jurisdiction and eliminated most of the remaining direct appeals from the lower courts. In 1988, after nearly two decades of debate over the Court's caseload, Congress removed virtually all of the Court's obligatory appellate jurisdiction (see Judicial Improvements and Access to Justice Act).
— Gregory A. Caldeira
