How does the Supreme Court decide which cases it will take?

[PlanetBev]

Or which it will revisit. Do they decide it with a 5 to 4 vote?

I have to assume that they took this so-called "partial-birth" abortion case because they are dying to uphold the federal ban.

[BOSSHOG]

1. Paper, rock, scissors?

Whomever the evil twins scalia and thomas are hating on any particular day. Isn't it ironic that some of the greatest advertisements for abortion are on the supreme court.

[ncrainbowgrrl]

2. I believe that the chief justice decides (I could be wrong though!) n/t

[shoelace414]

4. the Chief Justice is mostly an honorary position

He has little REAL power on his own.

[ISUGRADIA]

10. He has a lot of power to shape the opinion and outcome of decisions

read The Brethren to get an idea of how much.

[ROakes1019]

3. SC

They have to decide that a Constitutional question is involved. These usually occur under the Civil Rights Amendments and the Commerce Clause, which states that no state can abridge the rights of other citizens while being partial to its own citizens. They can't just take up an issue; there must be a claimant with standing whose rights are involved and not moot.

[PlanetBev]

5. Thanks, guys

I've always been curious about this.

[MadMaddie]

6. I found this information...

I want to say that I read somewhere that the aids to the justices are the ones that actually choose the cases...I don't know if that is true...

http://www.cas.okstate.edu/jb/faculty/senat/jb3163/supremecourt.html

[Inland]

7. Okay, this is the actual answer.

a small set of cases are in the SC whether they want them or not. Boundary disputes between states, for example.

Everything else is by choice, based on a vote of FOUR justices to hear the case. People make petitions for "writs of certiorari", which is latin for on order from the SC to the court to send the file. The writ issues on the affirmative vote of four justices.

Now, the SC has issued its own decisions on what kinds of cases it will hear. It won't hear cases without a substantial federal question arising out of federal law, treaty, constitution. It won't hear any case from the state courts until the state court appeals have been exhausted.

And most controversial of all, it won't hear cases until there the lower courts have turned it over for a few years. The SC usually let's a good division of opinion get mulled over in appellate courts, then it steps in after a decade of division and resolves it. For the same reason, it doesn't bother with cases that don't resolve a recurring legal issue. As Douglas said, it's a court of law, not a court of justice. That one guy got wrongly convicted and is going to be put to death isn't going to get its ear.

If you want to see the SC completely ignore all these principles, see some of the analysis of Bush v. Gore.

Every once in a while, a justice will dissent from the vote on whether or not to grant cert. But 95% of the petitions are just refused without comment.

[Bake]

8. Good answer.

In addition, the Court will often times hear cases to resolve a "split among the Circuits," i.e., where two Circuit Courts of Appeal have come down on opposite sides of the fence. Since Circuit precedent is binding on all District Courts within the Circuit (which encompasses several states), you can have different versions of federal law in different parts of the country. So SCOTUS will often take a case to resolve that conflict.

Bake, Esq.

[Lexingtonian]

9. It's a committee process

A couple of clerks in different Justices' offices read the briefs and sort out the Constitutional issues involved and write some kind of summaries. The Justices then look over the summaries and various of the briefs on their own, and come to some sort of firm opinions about there being relevant issues and their importance. Then the Justices meet in committee and go through the list. I think the average term gets about 5,000 applications. They narrow things down to 50-100 to take. Maybe 5 or 10 will get any coverage in the press, most of the 50-100 are obscure stuff important in narrow ways, in e.g. the world of corporate finance or minor state employee rights and don't involve all that much energy or effort or acrimony on the Court.

Breyer was on Charlie Rose's show a few weeks ago and described the process. He said a lot of the applications they get are routine stuff unimportant in the larger life of the country- death penalty appeals, financial awards in appellate court by the hundreds- that they can't take without bogging the court down horribly. Some stuff is just plainly so bad they remand it to appellate courts immediately. And there are cases the Court won't usually take because there is a need for some social consensus or social conditions for the verdict to be respected- gun stuff, for example. Then they have to sort the rest out- Breyer says it's a few hundred. A few are obviously so important in the larger life of the country that they have to be dealt with. The rest the Justices disagree on the importance of and on the question of justice involved, and that comes down to votes. He claims personally to ultimately do things on a criterion of whether the minority/losing party's rights are adequately respected or the majority/prevailing party's rights are excessive or excessively enforced. (He used the phrase "kicking the shit out of the minority", as I recall).

[Neil Lisst]

11. it takes 4 of 9 justices to grant cert to hear a case

When 4 of 9 think an issue needs to be addressed at the Supreme Court level, they vote to hear the case.