Supreme Court of the United States

• 1. Introduction

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  The Supreme Court of the United States receives roughly 7,000 requests for review every single year. It says yes to about 80. That act of choosing, of deciding which questions about American law are worth answering, sits at the heart of what makes this institution so powerful and so mysterious. Nine people, appointed for life, hold the authority to strike down laws passed by Congress, to nullify presidential orders, and to determine the meaning of a Constitution written more than two centuries ago. How did an institution sketched in only the vaguest terms at a Philadelphia convention in 1787 become the ultimate arbiter of American life? And what happens when the court itself becomes a subject of controversy?

• 2. Born from Compromise

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  Philadelphia in 1787 was a city of argument. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention were four years removed from the end of the Revolutionary War, still working out what kind of country they were building. On the question of a national judiciary, they disagreed sharply. Some delegates, opposed to a strong central government, argued that state courts could simply enforce national laws. James Madison and others pushed for a national judicial authority chosen by the national legislature. There was also a proposal that judges should play a role in checking executive power over legislation. The framers resolved the standoff by writing almost nothing. Article Three of the Constitution vests federal judicial power in "one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish," but leaves the details blank.

  The task of filling in those details fell to the First Congress. Through the Judiciary Act of 1789, Congress gave the court its initial shape: a chief justice and five associate justices, based in the nation's capital, with the country divided into judicial districts organized into circuits. Justices were required to ride circuit, traveling twice a year to hold court in their assigned regions, a physically demanding practice that many resented. President George Washington nominated John Jay as the first chief justice, and nominated John Rutledge, William Cushing, Robert H. Harrison, James Wilson, and John Blair Jr. as the six associate justices. All six were confirmed by the Senate on the 26th of September 1789. Harrison declined to serve, and Washington later chose James Iredell as his replacement.

  The court held its first session from February 2 through the 10th of February 1790, at the Royal Exchange in New York City, then the nation's capital. Those earliest sessions were given over entirely to organizational matters; no actual cases reached the court until 1791. The court moved with the capital to Philadelphia, then to Washington, D.C., and spent more than a century holding sessions in the Capitol building before finally getting its own home in 1935.

• 3. The Power to Strike Down

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  West v. Barnes, decided in 1791, was the court's first case. It turned on a point of procedure, hardly the stuff of legend. The court in those years was underworked and underestimated, lacking a permanent home and carrying little prestige. Its early low point came with Chisholm v. Georgia in 1793, a decision reversed within two years by the ratification of the Eleventh Amendment.

  Everything changed with the Marshall Court. John Marshall served as chief justice from 1801 to 1835, and during that stretch the court transformed itself from a minor institutional player into the supreme expositor of the Constitution. In 1803, the court asserted the power of judicial review in Marbury v. Madison, claiming for itself the authority to invalidate an act of Congress as unconstitutional. The Marshall Court also ended the old British practice of each justice issuing a separate opinion, replacing it with a single majority opinion that spoke for the court as a whole. Cases like Martin v. Hunter's Lessee, McCulloch v. Maryland, and Gibbons v. Ogden defined the balance of power between the federal government and the states. Marshall's tenure also produced a pointed test of judicial independence: the impeachment of Justice Samuel Chase in 1804. The House adopted eight articles of impeachment against him. The Senate acquitted him, and Chase remained on the court until his death in 1811.

• 4. Crisis and Civil War

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  Roger Taney took over as chief justice in 1836, and his court left a record divided between the consequential and the catastrophic. The Taney Court established that Congress could limit the jurisdiction of lower federal courts over certain subjects, a ruling with lasting structural significance. But the court under Taney is remembered above all for Dred Scott v. Sandford, a decision that helped push the country toward civil war. The size of the court itself became a political instrument during this era. Through a series of congressional adjustments tied to circuit riding demands and outright political maneuvering, the number of seats rose from six to seven in 1807, to nine in 1837, and to ten in 1863.

  After the Civil War, the Republican Congress worked to limit the power of Democratic President Andrew Johnson over court appointments. Under Chief Justice Chase's influence, Congress passed the Judicial Circuits Act of 1866, providing that the next three retiring justices would not be replaced. One seat was eliminated in 1866 and a second in 1867. When Ulysses S. Grant succeeded Johnson, Congress reversed course with the Judiciary Act of 1869, restoring the bench to nine justices and allowing Grant to immediately appoint two new members. That number, nine, has held ever since.

• 5. New Deal, War, and the Warren Era

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  Franklin D. Roosevelt's frustration with the court reached its peak in 1937. The justices had repeatedly struck down elements of his New Deal, and Roosevelt proposed a remedy: appoint one additional justice for every sitting justice who had reached the age of 70 years and 6 months and declined to retire, up to a maximum bench of 15. The stated purpose was to ease the burden on elderly judges. The actual purpose was broadly understood as an attempt to pack the court with sympathetic votes. The proposal went down 70-20 in the Senate, with members of Roosevelt's own Democratic Party helping to defeat it. The Senate Judiciary Committee's report declared it "essential to the continuance of our constitutional democracy" that the proposal "be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America."

  During World War II the court upheld the internment of Japanese Americans in Korematsu v. United States, a decision later repudiated. The post-war Warren Court, from 1953 to 1969, moved aggressively in a different direction. Under Chief Justice Earl Warren, the court held in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation in public schools violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, required that legislative districts be roughly equal in population under Reynolds v. Sims, recognized a general right to privacy in Griswold v. Connecticut, and required police to inform criminal suspects of their rights in Miranda v. Arizona. The Warren Court also incorporated most guarantees of the Bill of Rights against the states and limited defamation suits brought by public figures in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan.

• 6. Partisan Drift

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  Devins and Baum, researchers who studied the court's ideological history, found that before 2010 the court never had clear ideological blocs that fell perfectly along party lines. Republican presidents sometimes appointed liberals; Democratic presidents sometimes appointed conservatives. Between 1790 and early 2010, the share of significant decisions with dissents that divided strictly along party lines was about one-half of one percent. Since 1991, by their account, ideology has become far more determinative, with all Republican appointees serving as committed conservatives and all Democratic appointees serving as liberals.

  The confirmation process itself reflects this shift. The first Supreme Court nominee to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee in person was Harlan Fiske Stone in 1925. The modern practice of sustained questioning began with John Marshall Harlan II in 1955. Before 1981, justices from the Truman through Nixon eras were typically confirmed within a month. The average time from nomination to final Senate vote since 1975 is 67 days. The Senate has explicitly rejected 12 nominees in its history, most recently Robert Bork, nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1987. President Lyndon B. Johnson's nomination of Abe Fortas for chief justice in 1968 became the first successful filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee, drawing opposition from both Republican and Democratic senators over Fortas's ethics.

  The confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett in October 2020, following Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death, produced a court with six justices appointed by Republican presidents and three by Democratic presidents. FiveThirtyEight found that unanimous decisions dropped from a 20-year average of nearly 50 percent to nearly 30 percent in 2021, while party-line rulings rose from a 60-year average just above zero to a record high of 21 percent. A 2024 AP-NORC poll found that 7 in 10 respondents believed the court decides cases to fit the justices' own ideologies rather than acting as an independent check on other branches.

• 7. Nine Justices and Their Rules

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  Lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices is a feature shared, in the United States, only with federal judges and the justices of Rhode Island's Supreme Court. Every other democratic nation, and every other U.S. state, applies term limits or mandatory retirement ages. Alexander Hamilton defended the arrangement in Federalist 78, arguing that permanency in office contributes to the court's "firmness and independence". Critics over the years have offered a different view: Larry Sabato wrote that lifetime tenure, combined with the appointment of relatively young attorneys, "produces senior judges representing the views of past generations better than views of the current day." James MacGregor Burns argued it creates "a critical time lag, with the Supreme Court institutionally almost always behind the times."

  The only justice ever impeached was Samuel Chase, in 1804. Two others, William O. Douglas and Abe Fortas, faced Judiciary Committee hearings; Douglas was the subject of hearings twice, in 1953 and again in 1970, while Fortas resigned in 1969 as hearings were being organized against him. On the 10th of July 2024, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez filed articles of impeachment against Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, citing their "widely documented financial and personal entanglements."

  Vacancies arrive unpredictably. Hugo Black and John Marshall Harlan II left the court within days of each other in September 1971, the shortest gap between vacancies in the court's history. At the other extreme, the retirement of Harry Blackmun in 1994 and the death of William Rehnquist in 2005 created an 11-year span between openings, the second longest in the court's history. Jimmy Carter is the only elected president to have served at least one full term without appointing a single justice. As of 2024, associate justices earn a yearly salary of $298,500, and the chief justice receives $312,200.

• 8. How the Court Works

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  Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the court on the 30th of June 2022, as the sixth woman and first African-American woman in the institution's history. That makes her the most junior justice, and by long custom the most junior justice in private conference is responsible for answering the door of the conference room and transmitting orders of the court to the clerk. Seniority shapes nearly every dimension of the court's internal life: who speaks first in conference, where justices sit on the bench, who assigns majority opinions when the chief justice is not in the majority.

  Most cases reach the court through petitions for writs of certiorari. Four of the nine justices must agree to grant a petition before it proceeds. The court's Rule 10 specifies the compelling reasons it looks for, chiefly resolving conflicts between circuit courts on the same legal question, correcting serious departures from accepted judicial procedure, and addressing important questions of federal law. A denial of cert is not a judgment on the merits; the lower court ruling simply stands. All justices except Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch participate in the internal cert pool, which manages the volume of petitions. Each side at oral argument receives 30 minutes, though since 2019 advocates may speak uninterrupted for the first two minutes. Cases are decided by majority vote, and the majority opinion, assigned by the most senior justice in the majority, creates binding precedent across American law. A plurality opinion, joined by fewer than half the justices, is only partially binding. Dissents and concurrences, by contrast, create no binding precedent but often influence how the law evolves in later years, making them documents the court's future members return to long after the original case is decided.