The U.S. Supreme Court

The United State's Supreme Court is the highest court in the Nation and is compromised of nine Justice's with one being the Chief Justice. This group of people hears cases in public, but reaches their decisions in private. This means that they hear the questions in a public courtroom in which lawyer's on opposing sides are given 30 minutes each to present their arguments for the court. Afterwards, the Justice's convene in a conference room to vote on a case.

As a person who tries to keep up to date on political news, I am not one who knows how said news is decided on or who decides on it. So watching this video and hearing from the Justice's how they operate the system and how complicated it can be was extremely educational. Something that I knew nothing about and learned a lot of information on was how long the Justice's serve for.

Chief Justice John Marshall

The Justice's serve for an average of 16 years each. This means that throughout all of American history that has been just over 100 Supreme Court Justice's. The longest serving Chief Justice was Chief Justice John Marshall who served for a little over 34 years, while the shortest serving Chief Justice was Chief Justice John Rutledge who served for just over 5 months. 

Chief Justice John Rutledge

The most important thing take-away from the video was that after voting on a case, a Justice on the majority side writes an opinion that explains the legal reason behind the decision. This process is the most time-consuming part of any of the Justice's work. The first draft of this normally finished in four weeks, however revisions and adjustments may go on for months. At times- if a case is particularly difficult- a Justice may switch sides. On extremely rare occurrences, the majority may become the minority. Also, regarding opinions, any Justice may write a separate opinion that can either dissent from the decision, or concur in the result, but disagree with the reasoning. 

Example of a Petition for Certiorari

The fact that the Supreme Court receives about 100 new cases every week- which makes almost 7,000 a year- is the most surprising thing that I learned from this video. From those numbers, the court only accept about 100 of the petitions for certiorari (the court process to seek judicial review of a lower court's or governmental agency's decision or ruling) a year.

By watching this video and taking in all of the new information, I learned truly how powerful the Supreme Court is and how much work the 9 Justice's have to do. Not only do they hear the petitions- often referred to as "questions"- but they have to interpret the United State's Constitution and uphold the rule of law whilst they reach their decision. Also, once they reach their decision they have to spend what can take months to write their opinion on the decision before the ruling can officially be released to the public.