HISTORY & WORKINGS OF SUPREME COURT

SUPREME COURT 

The Supreme Court is something that when it first comes to mind you think of power and decision making. They are responsible for accepting cases that tend to have a lot of meaning and significance to then make a decision that will ultimately decide future precedent. 

Since this Court was developed, there have been over one hundred Supreme Court Justices that serve on average sixteen years. However, many of them will serve much longer than that. When watching the video I got a sense of how slim the chances are of becoming one of these Chief Justices, in fact one of them compares it to getting struck by lightening. They are able to tell Congress, the President, and the States what can or cannot be done, which is a lot of power. Something mentioned in the video, it took almost "two hundred years for Americans to accept their authority." I can believe this to be true considering how much power and control they have over what can happen. 

Something that I didn't know about the Supreme Court was that they typically receive more than one hundred cases every week and roughly seven thousand a year. This is an insane amount of reading and decision making for these Chief Justices. Some things they consider when deciding which cases get accepted and which don't is, "was the law applied properly in the lower court?" and "is the law constitutional?." 

I was happy to hear that no matter who the individual is that files the application for their case to be handled, each one gets the same consideration. With my prior knowledge, I would have assumed that without the highest level of names on the case it most likely didn't get the same consideration. But this is what is so impressive and important with the Supreme Court is that they have a lot of power in their hands, and they prioritize fair consideration. 

One last thing that I wanted to touch on as this was new and surprising information to me, the Supreme Court selects one justice on the majority side to write their opinion on the legal reasons for the decision. This was shocking to me because I always assumed they got together to discuss what will be written as this document could be very important in the future. They mention that this written piece could decide future precedent so it is a long process that is taken care of with a lot of importance. That to me, seems like a lot of pressure on one of the Justices, but I can see the benefit of having one voice instead of many.