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Supreme Court of the United States community

Maya Lindstrom · 2026-08-24T13:15:07.017Z

Which of this term's rulings do you think will have the broadest long-term impact—disability rights, tariffs, gender-affirming care, or the climate/permitting cases—and why?

Supreme Court of the United States — news, coverage & facts — IJR

History

In 1787, four years after the end of the American Revolutionary War, delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention convened in Philadelphia, where they debated the separation of powers between the legislative and executive departments and established parameters for a national judiciary as a third branch of the federal government. In the British tradition, judicial matters had been the responsibility of the royal (executive) authority. During the Constitutional Convention, delegates opposed to having a strong central government argued that national laws could be enforced by state courts. James Madison and others advocated for a national judicial authority chosen by the national legislature. It was proposed that the judiciary should have a role in checking executive branch power to veto or revise laws.

The framers ultimately compromised by sketching only a general outline of the judiciary in Article Three of the United States Constitution, vesting federal judicial power in "one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish." They did not delineate the exact powers or prerogatives of the Supreme Court or determine how the judicial branch should be organized.

The 1st United States Congress provided the detailed organization of a federal judiciary through the Judiciary Act of 1789. They decided that the Supreme Court, as the country's highest judicial tribunal, would be based in the nation's capital and would be composed of a chief justice and five associate justices. The act also divided the country into judicial districts, which were in turn organized into circuits. Justices were required to hold circuit court twice a year in their assigned judicial district.

Immediately after signing the act into law, President George Washington nominated John Jay as the court's new chief justice, and John Rutledge, William Cushing, Robert H. Harrison, James Wilson and John Blair Jr. as its associate justices. All six were confirmed by the U.S. Senate on September 26, 1789. Harrison declined to serve, and Washington later nominated James Iredell to replace him.

The Supreme Court held its inaugural session from February 2 through February 10, 1790, at the Royal Exchange in New York City, then the U.S. capital. A second session was held there in August 1790. The earliest sessions of the court were devoted to organizational proceedings, as the first cases did not reach it until 1791. When the nation's capital was moved to Philadelphia in 1790, the Supreme Court moved to Philadelphia with it. After initially meeting in present-day Independence Hall, the court established its chambers at city hall. When the capital moved to Washington, D.C., the court was held in the U.S. Capitol Building (see, e.g. Old Supreme Court Chamber) until 1935 when it moved to its own building.

Burger, Rehnquist, and Roberts

The Burger Court (1969–1986) saw a conservative shift. It also expanded Griswold's right to privacy to strike down abortion laws (Roe v. Wade) but divided deeply on affirmative action (Regents of the University of California v. Bakke) and campaign finance regulation (Buckley v. Valeo). It also wavered on the death penalty, ruling first that most applications were defective (Furman v. Georgia), but later that the death penalty itself was not unconstitutional (Gregg v. Georgia).

The Rehnquist Court (1986–2005) was known for its revival of judicial enforcement of federalism, emphasizing the limits of the Constitution's affirmative grants of power (United States v. Lopez) and the force of its restrictions on those powers (Seminole Tribe v. Florida, City of Boerne v. Flores). It struck down single-sex state schools as a violation of equal protection (United States v. Virginia), laws against sodomy as violations of substantive due process (Lawrence v. Texas) and the line-item veto (Clinton v. New York) but upheld school vouchers (Zelman v. Simmons-Harris) and reaffirmed Roe's restrictions on abortion laws (Planned Parenthood v. Casey). The court's decision in Bush v. Gore, which ended the electoral recount during the 2000 United States presidential election, remains especially controversial with debate ongoing over the rightful winner and whether or not the ruling should set a precedent.

The Roberts Court (2005–present) is regarded as more conservative and controversial than the Rehnquist Court. Some of its major rulings have concerned federal preemption (Wyeth v. Levine), civil procedure (Twombly–Iqbal), voting rights and federal preclearance (Shelby County), abortion (Gonzales v. Carhart and Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization), climate change (Massachusetts v. EPA), same-sex marriage (United States v. Windsor and Obergefell v. Hodges), and the Bill of Rights, such as in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (First Amendment), Heller–McDonald–Bruen (Second Amendment), and Baze v. Rees (Eighth Amendment).

Nomination, confirmation, and appointment

Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution, known as the Appointments Clause, empowers the president to nominate and, with the confirmation (advice and consent) of the United States Senate, to appoint public officials, including justices of the Supreme Court. This clause is one example of the system of checks and balances inherent in the Constitution. The president has the plenary power to nominate, while the Senate possesses the plenary power to reject or confirm the nominee. The Constitution sets no qualifications for service as a justice, such as age, citizenship, residence or prior judicial experience, thus a president may nominate anyone to serve, and the Senate may not set any qualifications or otherwise limit who the president can choose. Nonetheless, the Senate may deny confirmation to a candidate that it deems unqualified or unsuitable for the appointment.

In modern times, the confirmation process has attracted considerable attention from the press and advocacy groups, which lobby senators to confirm or to reject a nominee depending on whether their track record aligns with the group's views. The Senate Judiciary Committee conducts hearings and votes on whether the nomination should go to the full Senate with a positive, negative or neutral report. The committee's practice of personally interviewing nominees is relatively recent. The first nominee to appear before the committee was Harlan Fiske Stone in 1925, who sought to quell concerns about his links to Wall Street, and the modern practice of questioning began with John Marshall Harlan II in 1955. Once the committee reports out the nomination, the full Senate considers it. Rejections are relatively uncommon; the Senate has explicitly rejected twelve Supreme Court nominees, most recently Robert Bork, nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1987.

Although Senate rules do not necessarily allow a negative or tied vote in committee to block a nomination, prior to 2017 a nomination could be blocked by filibuster once debate had begun in the full Senate. President Lyndon B. Johnson's nomination of sitting associate justice Abe Fortas to succeed Earl Warren as Chief Justice in 1968 was the first successful filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee. It included both Republican and Democratic senators concerned with Fortas's ethics. President Donald Trump's nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the seat left vacant by Antonin Scalia's death was the second. Unlike the Fortas filibuster, only Democratic senators voted against cloture on the Gorsuch nomination, citing his perceived conservative judicial philosophy, and the Republican majority's prior refusal to take up President Barack Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to fill the vacancy. This led the Republican majority to change the rules and eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations.

Not every Supreme Court nominee has received a floor vote in the Senate. A president may withdraw a nomination before an actual confirmation vote occurs, typically because it is clear that the Senate will reject the nominee; this occurred with President George W. Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers in 2005. The Senate may also fail to act on a nomination, which expires at the end of the session. President Dwight Eisenhower's first nomination of John Marshall Harlan II in November 1954 was not acted on by the Senate; Eisenhower re-nominated Harlan in January 1955, and Harlan was confirmed two months later. Most recently, the Senate failed to act on the March 2016 nomination of Merrick Garland, as the nomination expired in January 2017, and the vacancy was filled by Neil Gorsuch, an appointee of President Trump.

Once the Senate confirms a nomination, the president must prepare and sign a commission, to which the Seal of the Department of Justice must be affixed, before the appointee can take office. The seniority of an associate justice is based on the commissioning date, not the confirmation or swearing-in date. After receiving their commission, the appointee must then take the two prescribed oaths before assuming their official duties. The importance of the oath taking is underscored by the case of Edwin M. Stanton. Although confirmed by the Senate on December 20, 1869, and duly commissioned as an associate justice by President Ulysses S. Grant, Stanton died on December 24, prior to taking the prescribed oaths. He is not, therefore, considered to have been a member of the court.

Before 1981, the approval process of justices was usually rapid. From the Truman through Nixon administrations, justices were typically approved within one month. From the Reagan administration to the present, the process has taken much longer and some believe this is because Congress sees justices as playing a more political role than in the past. According to the Congressional Research Service, the average number of days from nomination to final Senate vote since 1975 is 67 days (2.2 months), while the median is 71 days (2.3 months).

When the Senate is in recess, a president may make temporary appointments to fill vacancies. Recess appointees hold office only until the end of the next Senate session (less than two years). The Senate must confirm the nominee for them to continue serving; of the two chief justices and eleven associate justices who have received recess appointments, only Chief Justice John Rutledge was not subsequently confirmed.

No U.S. president since Dwight D. Eisenhower has made a recess appointment to the court, and the practice has become rare and controversial even in lower federal courts. In 1960, after Eisenhower had made three such appointments, the Senate passed a "sense of the Senate" resolution that recess appointments to the court should only be made in "unusual circumstances"; such resolutions are not legally binding but are an expression of Congress's views in the hope of guiding executive action.

The Supreme Court's 2014 decision in National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning limited the ability of the president to make recess appointments (including appointments to the Supreme Court); the court ruled that the Senate decides when the Senate is in session or in recess. Writing for the court, Justice Breyer stated, "We hold that, for purposes of the Recess Appointments Clause, the Senate is in session when it says it is, provided that, under its own rules, it retains the capacity to transact Senate business." This ruling allows the Senate to prevent recess appointments through the use of pro-forma sessions.

Tenure

Lifetime tenure of justices can only be found for US federal judges and the State of Rhode Island's Supreme Court justices, with all other democratic nations and all other US states having set term limits or mandatory retirement ages. Larry Sabato wrote: "The insularity of lifetime tenure, combined with the appointments of relatively young attorneys who give long service on the bench, produces senior judges representing the views of past generations better than views of the current day." Sanford Levinson has been critical of justices who stayed in office despite medical deterioration based on longevity. James MacGregor Burns stated lifelong tenure has "produced a critical time lag, with the Supreme Court institutionally almost always behind the times". Proposals to solve these problems include term limits for justices, as proposed by Levinson and Sabato and a mandatory retirement age proposed by Richard Epstein, among others. Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 78 argued that one benefit of lifetime tenure was that, "nothing can contribute so much to its firmness and independence as permanency in office".

Article Three, Section 1 of the Constitution provides that justices "shall hold their offices during good behavior", which is understood to mean that they may serve for the remainder of their lives, until death; furthermore, the phrase is generally interpreted to mean that the only way justices can be removed from office is by Congress via the impeachment process. The Framers of the Constitution chose good behavior tenure to limit the power to remove justices and to ensure judicial independence. No constitutional mechanism exists for removing a justice who is permanently incapacitated by illness or injury, but unable (or unwilling) to resign. The only justice ever to be impeached was Samuel Chase, in 1804. The House of Representatives adopted eight articles of impeachment against him; however, he was acquitted by the Senate, and remained in office until his death in 1811. Two justices, William O. Douglas and Abe Fortas were subjected to hearings from the Judiciary Committee, with Douglas being the subject of hearings twice, in 1953 and again in 1970 and Fortas resigned while hearings were being organized in 1969. On July 10, 2024, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez filed Articles of Impeachment against justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, citing their "widely documented financial and personal entanglements".

Because justices have indefinite tenure, timing of vacancies can be unpredictable. Sometimes they arise in quick succession, as in September 1971, when Hugo Black and John Marshall Harlan II left within days of each other, the shortest period of time between vacancies in the court's history. Sometimes a great length of time passes between vacancies, such as the 11-year span, from 1994 to 2005, from the retirement of Harry Blackmun to the death of William Rehnquist, which was the second longest timespan between vacancies in the court's history. On average a new justice joins the court about every two years.

Despite the variability, all but four presidents have been able to appoint at least one justice. William Henry Harrison died a month after taking office, although his successor (John Tyler) made an appointment during that presidential term. Likewise, Zachary Taylor died 16 months after taking office, but his successor (Millard Fillmore) also made a Supreme Court nomination before the end of that term. Andrew Johnson, who became president after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, was denied the opportunity to appoint a justice by a reduction in the size of the court. Jimmy Carter is the only person elected president to have left office after at least one full term without having the opportunity to appoint a justice. Presidents James Monroe, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and George W. Bush each served a full term without an opportunity to appoint a justice, but made appointments during their subsequent terms in office. No president who has served more than one full term has gone without at least one opportunity to make an appointment.

Size of the court

The U.S. Supreme Court consists of nine members: one chief justice and eight associate justices. The U.S. Constitution does not specify the size of the Supreme Court, nor does it specify any specific positions for the court's members. The Constitution assumes the existence of the office of the chief justice, because it mentions in Article I, Section 3, Clause 6 that "the Chief Justice" must preside over impeachment trials of the president of the United States. The power to define the Supreme Court's size and membership has been assumed to belong to Congress, which initially established a six-member Supreme Court composed of a chief justice and five associate justices through the Judiciary Act of 1789.

The size of the court was first altered by the Midnight Judges Act of 1801 which would have reduced the size of the court to five members upon its next vacancy (as federal judges have life tenure), but the Judiciary Act of 1802 promptly negated the 1801 act, restoring the court's size to six members before any such vacancy occurred. As the nation's boundaries grew across North America and as Supreme Court justices in those days had to ride the circuit, an arduous process requiring long travel on horseback or carriage over harsh terrain that resulted in months-long extended stays away from home, Congress added justices to correspond with the growth. Through this process, the number of seats for associate justices plus the chief justice became seven in 1807, nine in 1837, and ten in 1863.

At the behest of Chief Justice Chase, and in an attempt by the Republican Congress to limit the power of Democrat Andrew Johnson, Congress passed the Judicial Circuits Act of 1866, providing that the next three justices to retire would not be replaced, which would thin the bench to seven justices by attrition. Consequently, one seat was removed in 1866 and a second in 1867. Soon after Johnson left office, the new president Ulysses S. Grant, a Republican, signed into law the Judiciary Act of 1869. This changed the number of justices to nine (where it has since remained), which allowed Grant to fill an additional seat.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to expand the court in 1937. His proposal envisioned the appointment of one additional justice for each incumbent justice who reached the age of 70 years 6 months and refused retirement, up to a maximum bench of 15 justices. The proposal was ostensibly to ease the burden of the docket on elderly judges, but the actual purpose was widely understood as an effort to "pack" the court with justices who would support Roosevelt's New Deal. The plan, usually called the "court-packing plan", failed in Congress after members of Roosevelt's own Democratic Party believed it to be unconstitutional. It was defeated 70–20 in the Senate, and the Senate Judiciary Committee reported that it was "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."

The expansion of a 5–4 conservative majority to a 6–3 supermajority during the first presidency of Donald Trump led to analysts calling the court the most conservative since the 1930s as well as calls for an expansion in the court's size to fix what some saw as an imbalance, with Republicans having appointed 14 of the 18 justices immediately preceding Amy Coney Barrett. In April 2021, during the 117th Congress, some Democrats in the House of Representatives introduced the Judiciary Act of 2021, a bill to expand the Supreme Court from nine to 13 seats. It met divided views within the party, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi did not bring it to the floor for a vote. Shortly after taking office in January 2021, President Joe Biden established a presidential commission to study possible reforms to the Supreme Court. The commission's December 2021 final report discussed, but took no position on, expanding the size of the court.

Lawyer and legal scholar Jonathan Turley has advocated for 19 justices, with the court being gradually expanded by two new members per presidential term, bringing the U.S. Supreme Court to a similar size as its counterparts in other developed countries. He says that a bigger court would reduce the power of the swing justice, ensure the court has "a greater diversity of views", and make confirmation of new justices less politically contentious.

Court demographics

The court has five male and four female justices. Among the nine justices, there are two African American justices (Justices Thomas and Jackson) and one Hispanic justice (Justice Sotomayor). One of the justices was born to at least one immigrant parent: Justice Alito's father was born in Italy.

At least six justices are Roman Catholics, one is Jewish, and one is Protestant. It is unclear whether Neil Gorsuch considers himself a Catholic or an Episcopalian. Historically, most justices have been Protestants, including 36 Episcopalians, 19 Presbyterians, 10 Unitarians, 5 Methodists, and 3 Baptists. The first Catholic justice was Roger Taney in 1836, and 1916 saw the appointment of the first Jewish justice, Louis Brandeis. In recent years the historical situation has reversed, as most recent justices have been either Catholic or Jewish.

Three justices are from the state of New York, two are from Washington, D.C., and one each is from New Jersey, Georgia, Colorado, and Louisiana. Eight of the justices received their Juris Doctor from an Ivy League law school: Neil Gorsuch, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and John Roberts from Harvard; plus Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas from Yale. Only Amy Coney Barrett did not; she received her Juris Doctor at Notre Dame.

Previous positions or offices, judicial or federal government, prior to joining the court (by order of seniority following the Chief Justice) include:

For much of the court's history, every justice was a man of Northwestern European descent, and almost always Protestant. Diversity concerns focused on geography, to represent all regions of the country, rather than religious, ethnic, or gender diversity. Racial, ethnic, and gender diversity in the court increased in the late 20th century. Thurgood Marshall became the first African-American justice in 1967. Sandra Day O'Connor became the first female justice in 1981. In 1986, Antonin Scalia became the first Italian-American justice. Marshall was succeeded by African-American Clarence Thomas in 1991. O'Connor was joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the first Jewish woman on the Court, in 1993. After O'Connor's retirement, Ginsburg was joined in 2009 by Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic and Latina justice, and in 2010 by Elena Kagan. After Ginsburg's death on September 18, 2020, Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed as the fifth woman in the court's history on October 26, 2020. Ketanji Brown Jackson is the sixth woman and first African-American woman on the court.

There have been six foreign-born justices in the court's history: James Wilson (1789–1798), born in Caskardy, Scotland; James Iredell (1790–1799), born in Lewes, England; William Paterson (1793–1806), born in County Antrim, Ireland; David Brewer (1889–1910), born to American missionaries in Smyrna, Ottoman Empire (now İzmir, Turkey); George Sutherland (1922–1939), born in Buckinghamshire, England; and Felix Frankfurter (1939–1962), born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (later Austria).

Since 1789, about one-third of the justices have been U.S. military veterans. Samuel Alito is the only veteran serving on the court. Retired justices Stephen Breyer and Anthony Kennedy also served in the U.S. military.

Judicial leanings

Justices are nominated by the president in power, and receive confirmation by the Senate, historically holding many of the views of the nominating president's political party. While justices do not represent or receive official endorsements from political parties, as is accepted practice in the legislative and executive branches, advocacy groups have played a role in the selection, nomination, and confirmation process. The Justices are often informally categorized in the media as being conservatives or liberal. Attempts to quantify the ideologies of jurists include the Segal–Cover score, Martin–Quinn score, and Judicial Common Space score.

Devins and Baum argue that before 2010, the Court never had clear ideological blocs that fell perfectly along party lines. In choosing their appointments, Presidents often focused more on friendship and political connections than on ideology. Republican presidents sometimes appointed liberals, and Democratic presidents sometimes appointed conservatives. As a result, "... between 1790 and early 2010 there were only two decisions that the Guide to the U.S. Supreme Court designated as important and that had at least two dissenting votes in which the Justices divided along party lines, about one-half of one percent." Even in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, Democratic and Republican elites tended to agree on some major issues, especially concerning civil rights and civil liberties—and so did the justices. But since 1991, they argue, ideology has been much more important in choosing justices—all Republican appointees have been committed conservatives, and all Democratic appointees have been liberals. As the more moderate Republican justices retired, the court has become more partisan. The Court became more sharply divided along partisan lines, with justices appointed by Republican presidents taking increasingly conservative positions and those appointed by Democrats taking increasingly liberal positions.

Following the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett in 2020 after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the court is composed of six justices appointed by Republican presidents and three appointed by Democratic presidents. It is popularly accepted that Chief Justice Roberts and associate justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, appointed by Republican presidents, compose the court's conservative wing, and that Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, appointed by Democratic presidents, compose the court's liberal wing. Prior to Justice Ginsburg's death in 2020, the conservative Chief Justice Roberts was sometimes described as the court's 'median justice' (with four justices more liberal and four more conservative than he is). Darragh Roche argues that Kavanaugh as 2021's median justice exemplifies the rightward shift in the court. Noah Feldman describes the current ideological makeup of the court as a three-way split between the liberal faction, centrist-conservative faction, and arch-conservative faction, each with three members.

FiveThirtyEight found the number of unanimous decisions dropped from the 20-year average of nearly 50% to nearly 30% in 2021 while party-line rulings increased from a 60-year average just above zero to a record high 21%. That year Ryan Williams pointed to the party-line votes for confirmations of justices as evidence that the court is of partisan importance to the Senate. In 2022, Simon Lazarus of Brookings critiqued the U.S. Supreme Court as an increasingly partisan institution. A 2024 AP-NORC poll showed 7 in 10 respondents believed the court decides cases to "fit their own ideologies" as opposed to "acting as an independent check on other branches of government by being fair and impartial."

Facilities

The Supreme Court first met on February 1, 1790, at the Merchants' Exchange Building in New York City. When Philadelphia became the capital, the court met briefly in Independence Hall before settling in Old City Hall from 1791 until 1800. After the government moved to Washington, D.C., the court occupied various spaces in the Capitol building until 1935, when it moved into its own purpose-built home. The four-story building was designed by Cass Gilbert in a classical style sympathetic to the surrounding buildings of the Capitol and Library of Congress, and is clad in marble. The building includes the courtroom, justices' chambers, an extensive law library, various meeting spaces, and auxiliary services including a gymnasium. The Supreme Court building is within the ambit of the Architect of the Capitol, but maintains its own Supreme Court Police, separate from the Capitol Police.

Located across First Street from the United States Capitol at One First Street NE and Maryland Avenue, the building is open to the public. Visitors may not tour the actual courtroom unaccompanied. There is a cafeteria, a gift shop, exhibits, and a half-hour informational film. When the court is not in session, lectures about the courtroom are held hourly from 9:30 am to 3:30 pm and reservations are not necessary. When the court is in session the public may attend oral arguments, which are held twice each morning (and sometimes afternoons) on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays in two-week intervals from October through late April, with breaks during December and February. Visitors are seated on a first-come first-served basis. One estimate is there are about 250 seats available. The number of open seats varies from case to case; for important cases, some visitors arrive the day before and wait through the night. The court releases opinions beginning at 10 am on scheduled "non-argument days" (also called opinion days) These sessions, which typically last 15 to 30-minute, are also open to the public. From mid-May until the end of June, at least one opinion day is scheduled each week. Supreme Court Police are available to answer questions.

Original jurisdiction

The Supreme Court has original and exclusive jurisdiction over cases between two or more states but may decline to hear such cases. It also possesses original but not exclusive jurisdiction to hear "all actions or proceedings to which ambassadors, other public ministers, consuls, or vice consuls of foreign states are parties; all controversies between the United States and a State; and all actions or proceedings by a State against the citizens of another State or against aliens."

In 1906, the court asserted its original jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for contempt of court in United States v. Shipp. The resulting proceeding remains the only contempt proceeding and only criminal trial in the court's history. The contempt proceeding arose from the lynching of Ed Johnson in Chattanooga, Tennessee the evening after Justice John Marshall Harlan granted Johnson a stay of execution to allow his lawyers to file an appeal. Johnson was removed from his jail cell by a lynch mob, aided by the local sheriff who left the prison virtually unguarded, and hanged from a bridge, after which a deputy sheriff pinned a note on Johnson's body reading: "To Justice Harlan. Come get your nigger now." The local sheriff, John Shipp, cited the Supreme Court's intervention as the rationale for the lynching. The court appointed its deputy clerk as special master to preside over the trial in Chattanooga with closing arguments made in Washington before the Supreme Court justices, who found nine individuals guilty of contempt, sentencing three to 90 days in jail and the rest to 60 days in jail.

In all other cases, the court has only appellate jurisdiction, including the ability to issue writs of mandamus and writs of prohibition to lower courts. It considers cases based on its original jurisdiction very rarely; almost all cases are brought to the Supreme Court on appeal. In practice, the only original jurisdiction cases heard by the court are disputes between two or more states.

Appellate jurisdiction

The court's appellate jurisdiction consists of appeals from federal courts of appeal (through certiorari, certiorari before judgment, and certified questions), the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces (through certiorari), the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico (through certiorari), the Supreme Court of the Virgin Islands (through certiorari), the District of Columbia Court of Appeals (through certiorari), and "final judgments or decrees rendered by the highest court of a State in which a decision could be had" (through certiorari). In the last case, an appeal may be made to the Supreme Court from a lower state court if the state's highest court declined to hear an appeal or lacks jurisdiction to hear an appeal. For example, a decision rendered by one of the Florida District Courts of Appeal can be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court if (a) the Supreme Court of Florida declined to grant certiorari, e.g. Florida Star v. B. J. F., or (b) the district court of appeal issued a per curiam decision simply affirming the lower court's decision without discussing the merits of the case, since the Supreme Court of Florida lacks jurisdiction to hear appeals of such decisions. The power of the Supreme Court to consider appeals from state courts, rather than just federal courts, was created by the Judiciary Act of 1789 and upheld early in the court's history, by its rulings in Martin v. Hunter's Lessee (1816) and Cohens v. Virginia (1821). The Supreme Court is the only federal court that has jurisdiction over direct appeals from state court decisions, although there are several devices that permit so-called "collateral review" of state cases. This "collateral review" often only applies to individuals on death row and not through the regular judicial system.

Since Article Three of the United States Constitution stipulates that federal courts may only entertain "cases" or "controversies", the Supreme Court cannot decide cases that are moot and it does not render advisory opinions, as the supreme courts of some states may do. For example, in DeFunis v. Odegaard (1974), the court dismissed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a law school affirmative action policy because the plaintiff student had graduated since he began the lawsuit, and a decision from the court on his claim would not be able to redress any injury he had suffered. However, the court recognizes some circumstances where it is appropriate to hear a case that is seemingly moot. If an issue is "capable of repetition yet evading review", the court would address it even though the party before the court would not themselves be made whole by a favorable result. In Roe v. Wade (1973), and other abortion cases, the court addresses the merits of claims pressed by pregnant women seeking abortions even if they are no longer pregnant because it takes longer than the typical human gestation period to appeal a case through the lower courts to the Supreme Court. Another mootness exception is voluntary cessation of unlawful conduct, in which the court considers the probability of recurrence and plaintiff's need for relief.

Justices as circuit justices

The United States is divided into thirteen circuit courts of appeals, each of which is assigned a "circuit justice" from the Supreme Court. Although this concept has been in continuous existence throughout the history of the republic, its meaning has changed through time. Under the Judiciary Act of 1789, each justice was required to "ride circuit", or to travel within the assigned circuit and consider cases alongside local judges. This practice encountered opposition from many justices, who cited the difficulty of travel. Moreover, there was a potential for a conflict of interest on the court if a justice had previously decided the same case while riding circuit. Circuit riding ended in 1891, when the Circuit Court of Appeals Act was passed, and circuit riding was officially abolished by Congress in 1911.

The circuit justice for each circuit is responsible for dealing with certain types of applications that, by law and the rules of the court, may be addressed by a single justice. Ordinarily, a justice will resolve such an application by simply endorsing it "granted" or "denied" or entering a standard form of order; however, the justice may elect to write an opinion, referred to as an in-chambers opinion. Congress has specifically authorized one justice to issue a stay pending certiorari in 28 U.S.C. § 2101(f). Each justice also decides routine procedural requests, such as for extensions of time.

Before 1990, the rules of the Supreme Court also stated that "a writ of injunction may be granted by any Justice in a case where it might be granted by the Court." However, this part of the rule (and all other specific mention of injunctions) was removed in the Supreme Court's rules revision of December 1989. Nevertheless, requests for injunctions under the All Writs Act are sometimes directed to the circuit justice. In the past, circuit justices also sometimes granted motions for bail in criminal cases, writs of habeas corpus, and applications for writs of error granting permission to appeal.

A circuit justice may sit as a judge on the Court of Appeals of that circuit, but over the past hundred years, this has rarely occurred. A circuit justice sitting with the Court of Appeals has seniority over the chief judge of the circuit. The chief justice has traditionally been assigned to the District of Columbia Circuit, the Fourth Circuit (which includes Maryland and Virginia, the states surrounding the District of Columbia), and, since it was established, the Federal Circuit. Each associate justice is assigned to one or two judicial circuits.

As of September 28, 2022, the allotment of the justices among the circuits is as follows:

Five of the current justices are assigned to circuits on which they previously sat as circuit judges: Chief Justice Roberts (D.C. Circuit), Justice Sotomayor (Second Circuit), Justice Alito (Third Circuit), Justice Barrett (Seventh Circuit), and Justice Gorsuch (Tenth Circuit). Justices Thomas, Kavanaugh, and Jackson all sat as circuit judges on the D.C. Circuit, which is assigned to Chief Justice Roberts. Justice Kagan is the only current member who did not serve as a judge prior to their appointment to the Court.

Case selection

Nearly all cases come before the court by way of petitions for writs of certiorari, commonly referred to as cert, upon which the court grants a writ of certiorari. The court may review via this process any civil or criminal case in the federal courts of appeals. It may also review by certiorari a final judgment of the highest court of a state if the judgment involves a question of federal statutory or constitutional law. A case may alternatively come before the court as a direct appeal from a three-judge federal district court. The party that petitions the court for review is the petitioner and the non-mover is the respondent.

Case names before the court are styled petitioner v. respondent, regardless of which party initiated the lawsuit in the trial court. For example, criminal prosecutions are brought in the name of the state and against an individual, as in State of Arizona v. Ernesto Miranda. If the defendant is convicted, and his conviction then is affirmed on appeal in the state supreme court, when he petitions for cert the name of the case becomes Miranda v. Arizona.

The court also hears questions submitted to it by appeals courts themselves via a process known as certification.

The Supreme Court relies on the record assembled by lower courts for the facts of a case and deals solely with the question of how the law applies to the facts presented. There are however situations where the court has original jurisdiction, such as when two states have a dispute against each other, or when there is a dispute between the United States and a state. In such instances, a case is filed with the Supreme Court directly. Examples of such cases include United States v. Texas, a case to determine whether a parcel of land belonged to the United States or to Texas, and Virginia v. Tennessee, a case turning on whether an incorrectly drawn boundary between two states can be changed by a state court, and whether the setting of the correct boundary requires Congressional approval. Although it has not happened since 1794 in the case of Georgia v. Brailsford, parties in an action at law in which the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction may request that a jury determine issues of fact. Georgia v. Brailsford remains the only case in which the court has empaneled a jury, in this case a special jury. Two other original jurisdiction cases involve colonial era borders and rights under navigable waters in New Jersey v. Delaware, and water rights between riparian states upstream of navigable waters in Kansas v. Colorado.

A cert petition is voted on at a session of the court called conference. A conference is a private meeting of the nine justices by themselves; the public and the justices' clerks are excluded. The rule of four permits four of the nine justices to grant a writ of certiorari. If it is granted, the case proceeds to the briefing stage; otherwise, the case ends. Except in death penalty cases and other cases in which the court orders briefing from the respondent, the respondent may, but is not required to, file a response to the cert petition. The court grants a petition for cert only for "compelling reasons", spelled out in the court's Rule 10. Such reasons include:

Resolving a conflict between circuit courts in the interpretation of a federal law or a provision of the federal Constitution

Correcting an egregious departure from the accepted and usual course of judicial proceedings

Resolving an important question of federal law, or to expressly review a decision of a lower court that conflicts directly with a previous decision of the court.

When a conflict of interpretations arises from differing interpretations of the same law or constitutional provision issued by different federal circuit courts of appeals, lawyers call this situation a "circuit split"; if the court votes to deny a cert petition, as it does in the vast majority of such petitions that come before it, it does so typically without comment. A denial of a cert petition is not a judgment on the merits of a case, and the decision of the lower court stands as the case's final ruling. To manage the high volume of cert petitions received by the court each year (of the more than 7,000 petitions the court receives each year, it will usually request briefing and hear oral argument in 100 or fewer), the court employs an internal case management tool known as the "cert pool"; currently, all justices except for Justices Alito and Gorsuch participate in the cert pool.

Decision

At the conclusion of oral argument, the case is submitted for decision. Cases are decided by majority vote of the justices. After the oral argument is concluded, usually in the same week as the case was submitted, the justices retire to another conference at which the preliminary votes are tallied and the court sees which side has prevailed. One of the justices in the majority is then assigned to write the court's opinion, also known as the "majority opinion", an assignment made by the most senior justice in the majority, with the chief justice always being considered the most senior. Drafts of the court's opinion circulate among the justices until the court is prepared to announce the judgment in a particular case.

Justices are free to change their votes on a case up until the decision is finalized and published. In any given case, a justice is free to choose whether or not to author an opinion or else simply join the majority or another justice's opinion. There are several primary types of opinions:

Opinion of the court: this is the binding decision of the Supreme Court. An opinion that more than half of the justices join (usually at least five justices, since there are nine justices in total; but in cases where some justices do not participate it could be fewer) is known as "majority opinion" and creates binding precedent in American law. Whereas an opinion that fewer than half of the justices join is known as a "plurality opinion" and is only partially binding precedent.

Concurring: a justice agrees with and joins the majority opinion but authors a separate concurrence to give additional explanations, rationales, or commentary. Concurrences do not create binding precedent.

Concurring in the judgment: a justice agrees with the outcome the court reached but disagrees with its reasons for doing so. A justice in this situation does not join the majority opinion. Like regular concurrences, these do not create binding precedent.

Dissent: a justice disagrees with the outcome the court reached and its reasoning. Justices who dissent from a decision may author their own dissenting opinions or, if there are multiple dissenting justices in a decision, may join another justice's dissent. Dissents do not create binding precedent. A justice may also join only part(s) of a particular decision, and may even agree with some parts of the outcome and disagree with others.

It is the court's practice to issue decisions in all cases argued in a particular term by the end of that term. Within that term, the court is under no obligation to release a decision within any set time after oral argument. Since recording devices are banned inside the courtroom of the Supreme Court Building, the delivery of the decision to the media has historically been done via paper copies in what was known as the "Running of the Interns". However, this practice has become passé as the Court now posts electronic copies of the opinions on its website as they are being announced.

It is possible that through recusals or vacancies the court divides evenly on a case. If that occurs, then the decision of the court below is affirmed, but does not establish binding precedent. In effect, it results in a return to the status quo ante. For a case to be heard, there must be a quorum of at least six justices. If a quorum is not available to hear a case and a majority of qualified justices believes that the case cannot be heard and determined in the next term, then the judgment of the court below is affirmed as if the court had been evenly divided. For cases brought to the Supreme Court by direct appeal from a United States District Court, the chief justice may order the case remanded to the appropriate U.S. Court of Appeals for a final decision there. This has only occurred once in U.S. history, in the case of United States v. Alcoa (1945).

Published opinions

The court's opinions are published in three stages. First, a slip opinion is made available on the court's web site and through other outlets. Next, several opinions and lists of the court's orders are bound together in paperback form, called a preliminary print of United States Reports, the official series of books in which the final version of the court's opinions appears.

About a year after the preliminary prints are issued, a final bound volume of U.S. Reports is issued by the Reporter of Decisions. The individual volumes of U.S. Reports are numbered so that users may cite this set of reports, or a competing version published by another commercial legal publisher but containing parallel citations, to allow those who read their pleadings and other briefs to find the cases quickly and easily.

As of January 2019, there are:

Final bound volumes of U.S. Reports: 569 volumes, covering cases to June 13, 2013 (part of the October 2012 term).

Slip opinions: 21 volumes (565–585 for 2011–2017 terms, three two-part volumes each), plus part 1 of volume 586 (2018 term).

As of March 2012, the U.S. Reports have published a total of 30,161 Supreme Court opinions, covering the decisions handed down from February 1790 to March 2012. This figure does not reflect the number of cases the court has taken up, as several cases can be addressed by a single opinion. See, for example, Parents v. Seattle, where Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education was also decided in the same opinion.

By a similar logic, Miranda v. Arizona decided Miranda and three other cases: Vignera v. New York, Westover v. United States, and California v. Stewart. A more unusual example is The Telephone Cases, which are a single set of interlinked opinions that take up the entire 126th volume of the U.S. Reports.

Opinions are also collected and published in two unofficial, parallel reporters: Supreme Court Reporter, published by West (now a part of Thomson Reuters), and United States Supreme Court Reports, Lawyers' Edition (simply known as Lawyers' Edition), published by LexisNexis. In court documents, legal periodicals and other legal media, case citations generally contain cites from each of the three reporters; for example, citation to Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is presented as Citizens United v. Federal Election Com'n, 585 U.S. 50, 130 S. Ct. 876, 175 L. Ed. 2d 753 (2010), with "S. Ct." representing the Supreme Court Reporter, and "L. Ed." representing the Lawyers' Edition.

Lawyers use an abbreviated format to cite cases, in the form "vol U.S. page, pin (year)", where vol is the volume number, page is the page number on which the opinion begins, and year is the year in which the case was decided. Optionally, pin is used to "pinpoint" to a specific page number within the opinion. For instance, the citation for Roe v. Wade is 410 U.S. 113 (1973), which means the case was decided in 1973 and appears on page 113 of volume 410 of U.S. Reports. For opinions or orders that have not yet been published in the preliminary print, the volume and page numbers may be replaced with ___

Institutional powers

The federal court system and the judicial authority to interpret the Constitution received little attention in the debates over the drafting and ratification of the Constitution. The power of judicial review, in fact, is nowhere mentioned in it. Over the ensuing years, the question of whether the power of judicial review was even intended by the drafters of the Constitution was quickly frustrated by the lack of evidence bearing on the question either way.

Nevertheless, the power of judiciary to overturn laws and executive actions it determines are unlawful or unconstitutional is a well-established precedent. Many of the Founding Fathers accepted the notion of judicial review; in Federalist No. 78, Alexander Hamilton wrote: "A Constitution is, in fact, and must be regarded by the judges, as a fundamental law. It therefore belongs to them to ascertain its meaning, and the meaning of any particular act proceeding from the legislative body. If there should happen to be an irreconcilable variance between the two, that which has the superior obligation and validity ought, of course, to be preferred; or, in other words, the Constitution ought to be preferred to the statute."

The Supreme Court established its own power to declare laws unconstitutional in Marbury v. Madison (1803), consummating the American system of checks and balances. In explaining the power of judicial review, Chief Justice John Marshall stated that the authority to interpret the law was the particular province of the courts, part of the duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. His contention was not that the court had privileged insight into constitutional requirements, but that it was the constitutional duty of the judiciary, as well as the other branches of government, to read and obey the dictates of the Constitution. This decision was criticized by then-President Thomas Jefferson who said, "the Constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please."

Since the founding of the republic, there has been a tension between the practice of judicial review and the democratic ideals of egalitarianism, self-government, self-determination and freedom of conscience. At one pole are those who view the federal judiciary and especially the Supreme Court as being "the most separated and least checked of all branches of government." Federal judges and justices on the Supreme Court are not required to stand for election by virtue of their tenure "during good behavior", and their pay may "not be diminished" while they hold their position (Section 1 of Article Three). Although subject to the process of impeachment, only one justice has ever been impeached and no Supreme Court justice has been removed from office. At the other pole are those who view the judiciary as the least dangerous branch, with little ability to resist the exhortations of the other branches of government.

Constraints

The Supreme Court cannot directly enforce its rulings; instead, it relies on respect for the Constitution and for the law for adherence to its judgments. Popular history claims an instance of judicial nonacquiesence in 1832, when the state of Georgia ignored the Supreme Court's decision in Worcester v. Georgia. President Andrew Jackson, who sided with the Georgia courts, is supposed to have remarked, "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!", but the tale is apocryphal.

Some state governments in the South also resisted the desegregation of public schools after the 1954 judgment Brown v. Board of Education. More recently, many feared that President Nixon would refuse to comply with the court's order in United States v. Nixon (1974) to surrender the Watergate tapes. Nixon ultimately complied with the Supreme Court's ruling.

Supreme Court decisions can be purposefully overturned by constitutional amendment, something that has happened on six occasions:

Chisholm v. Georgia (1793) – overturned by the Eleventh Amendment (1795)

Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) – overturned by the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) and the Fourteenth Amendment (1868)

Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co. (1895) – overturned by the Sixteenth Amendment (1913)

Minor v. Happersett (1875) – overturned by the Nineteenth Amendment (1920)

Breedlove v. Suttles (1937) – overturned by the Twenty-fourth Amendment (1964)

Oregon v. Mitchell (1970) – overturned by the Twenty-sixth Amendment (1971)

Recognizing the difficulty of constitutional amendment, and to avoid the antidemocratic problems inherent to the publication of decisions holding legislation or executive actions unconstitutional, the Court has resorted to self-imposed canons of construction and doctrinal rules, such as the doctrine of constitutional avoidance, to minimize occurrences where the political branches or popular movements should need to reverse the Court via constitutional amendment.

When the court rules on matters involving the interpretation of federal statutes rather than of the Constitution, simple legislative action can reverse the decisions (for example, in 2009 Congress passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, superseding the limitations given in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. in 2007). Also, the Supreme Court is not immune from political and institutional consideration: lower federal courts and state courts sometimes resist doctrinal innovations, as do law enforcement officials.

In addition, the other two branches can restrain the court through other mechanisms. Congress can increase the number of justices, giving the president power to influence future decisions by appointments (as in Roosevelt's court-packing plan discussed above). Congress can pass legislation that restricts the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and other federal courts over certain topics and cases: this is suggested by language in Section 2 of Article Three, where the appellate jurisdiction is granted "with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make." The court sanctioned such congressional action in the Reconstruction Era case Ex parte McCardle (1869), although it rejected Congress' power to dictate how particular cases must be decided in United States v. Klein (1871).

On the other hand, through its power of judicial review, the Supreme Court has defined the scope and nature of the powers and separation between the legislative and executive branches of the federal government; for example, in United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp. (1936), Dames & Moore v. Regan (1981), and notably in Goldwater v. Carter (1979), which effectively gave the presidency the power to terminate ratified treaties without the consent of Congress. The court's decisions can also impose limitations on the scope of Executive authority, as in Humphrey's Executor v. United States (1935), the Steel Seizure Case (1952), and United States v. Nixon (1974).

Law clerks

Each Supreme Court justice hires several law clerks to review petitions for writ of certiorari, research them, prepare bench memorandums, and draft opinions. Associate justices are allowed four clerks. The chief justice is allowed five clerks, but Chief Justice Rehnquist hired only three per year, and Chief Justice Roberts usually hires only four. Generally, law clerks serve a term of one to two years.

The first law clerk was hired by Associate Justice Horace Gray in 1882. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Louis Brandeis were the first Supreme Court justices to use recent law school graduates as clerks, rather than hiring "a stenographer-secretary". Most law clerks are recent law school graduates.

The first female clerk was Lucile Lomen, hired in 1944 by Justice William O. Douglas. The first African-American, William T. Coleman Jr., was hired in 1948 by Justice Felix Frankfurter. A disproportionately large number of law clerks have obtained law degrees from elite law schools, especially Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago, Columbia, and Stanford. From 1882 to 1940, 62% of law clerks were graduates of Harvard Law School. Those chosen to be Supreme Court law clerks usually have graduated in the top of their law school class and were often an editor of the law review or a member of the moot court board. By the mid-1970s, clerking previously for a judge in a federal court of appeals had also become a prerequisite to clerking for a Supreme Court justice.

Ten Supreme Court justices previously clerked for other justices: Byron White for Frederick M. Vinson, John Paul Stevens for Wiley Rutledge, William Rehnquist for Robert H. Jackson, Stephen Breyer for Arthur Goldberg, John Roberts for William Rehnquist, Elena Kagan for Thurgood Marshall, Neil Gorsuch for both Byron White and Anthony Kennedy, Brett Kavanaugh also for Kennedy, Amy Coney Barrett for Antonin Scalia, and Ketanji Brown Jackson for Stephen Breyer. Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh served under Kennedy during the same term.

Gorsuch is the first justice to clerk for and subsequently serve alongside the same justice, serving alongside Kennedy from April 2017 through Kennedy's retirement in 2018. With the confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh, for the first time a majority of the Supreme Court was composed of former Supreme Court law clerks (Roberts, Breyer, Kagan, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, now joined by Barrett and Jackson, who replaced Breyer).

Several current Supreme Court justices have also clerked in the federal courts of appeals: John Roberts for Judge Henry Friendly of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Justice Samuel Alito for Judge Leonard I. Garth of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Elena Kagan for Judge Abner J. Mikva of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Neil Gorsuch for Judge David B. Sentelle of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Brett Kavanaugh for Judge Walter Stapleton of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and Judge Alex Kozinski of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and Amy Coney Barrett for Judge Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Composition and selection

The electoral college (which elects the President who nominates the justices) and the U.S. Senate which confirms the justices, have selection biases that favor rural states that tend to vote Republican, resulting in a conservative Supreme Court. Ziblatt and Levitsky estimate that 3 or 4 of the seats held by conservative justices on the court would be held by justices appointed by a Democratic president if the Presidency and Senate were selected directly by the popular vote. The three Trump appointees to the court were all nominated by a president who finished second in the popular vote and confirmed by Senators representing a minority of Americans. In addition, Clarence Thomas' confirmation in 1991 and Merrick Garland's blocked confirmation in 2016 were both decided by senators representing a minority of Americans. Greg Price also critiqued the Court as minority rule.

The Federalist Society acted as a filter for judicial nominations during the first Trump administration, ensuring the latest conservative justices lean even further to the right. 86% of judges Trump appointed to circuit courts and the Supreme Court were Federalist Society members. David Litt critiques it as "an attempt to impose rigid ideological dogma on a profession once known for intellectual freedom." Kate Aronoff criticizes the donations from special interests like fossil fuel companies and other dark money groups to the Federalist Society and related organizations seeking to influence lawyers and Supreme Court Justices.

The 2016 stonewalling of Merrick Garland's confirmation and subsequent filling with Neil Gorsuch has been critiqued as a 'stolen seat' citing precedent from the 20th century of confirmations during election years, while proponents cited three blocked nominations between 1844 and 1866. In recent years, Democrats have accused Republican leaders such as Mitch McConnell of hypocrisy, as they were instrumental in blocking the nomination of Garland, but then quickly confirmed Amy Coney Barrett's nomination even though both vacancies occurred close to an election.

Ethics

Supreme Court justices have come under greater scrutiny since 2022, following public disclosures that began with the founder of Faith and Action admissions regarding the organization's long-term influence-peddling scheme, dubbed "Operation Higher Court", designed for wealthy donors among the religious right to gain access to the justices through events held by The Supreme Court Historical Society.

Ethical controversies have grown during the 2020s, with reports of justices (and their close family members) accepting expensive gifts, travel, business deals, and speaking fees without oversight or recusals from cases that present conflicts of interest. Spousal income and connections to cases has been redacted from the Justices' ethical disclosure forms while justices, such as Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, failed to disclose many large financial gifts including free vacations valued at as much as $500,000.

In 2024, Justices Alito and Thomas refused calls to recuse themselves from January 6 cases where their spouses have taken public stances or been involved in efforts to overturn the election. In 2017, Neil Gorsuch sold a property he co-owned for $1.8 million to the CEO of a prominent law firm, who was not listed on his ethics form when reporting a profit of between $250,000 and $500,000.

The criticism intensified after the 2024 Trump v. United States decision granted broad immunity to presidents, with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez saying she would introduce impeachment articles when Congress is back in session. On July 10, 2024, she filed Articles of Impeachment against Thomas and Alito, citing their "widely documented financial and personal entanglements". As of late July 2024, nearly 1.4 million people had signed a moveon.org petition asking Congress to remove Justice Thomas.

President Biden proposed term limits for justices, an enforceable ethics code, and elimination of "immunity for crimes a former president committed while in office".

Yale professor of constitutional law Akhil Reed Amar wrote an op-ed for The Atlantic titled Something Has Gone Deeply Wrong at the Supreme Court.

Other criticisms of the Court include weakening corruption laws impacting branches beyond the judiciary and citing falsehoods in written opinions, often supplied to the justices by amicus briefs from groups advocating a particular outcome. Allison Orr Larsen, Associate Dean at William & Mary Law School, wrote in Politico that the court should address this by requiring disclosure of all funders of amicus briefs and the studies they cite, only admit briefs that stay within the expertise of the authors (as is required in lower courts), and require the briefs to be submitted much earlier in the process so the history and facts have time to be challenged and uncovered.

On November 13, 2023, the court issued its first-ever Code of Conduct for Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States to set "ethics rules and principles that guide the conduct of the Members of the Court." The Code has been received by some as a significant first step but does not address the ethics concerns of many notable critics who found the Code was a significantly weakened version of the rules for other federal judges, let alone the legislature and the executive branch, while also lacking an enforcement mechanism. The Code's commentary denied past wrongdoing by saying that the Justices have largely abided by these principles and are simply publishing them now. This has prompted some criticism that the court hopes to legitimize past and future scandals through this Code.

The ethics rules guiding the justices are set and enforced by the justices themselves, meaning the members of the court have no external checks on their behavior other than the impeachment of a justice by Congress.

Chief Justice Roberts refused to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in April 2023, reasserting his desire for the Supreme Court to continue to monitor itself despite mounting ethics scandals. Lower courts, by contrast, discipline according to the 1973 Code of Conduct for U.S. judges which is enforced by the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act of 1980.

Article III, Section I, Constitution of the United States, 1776 establishes that the justices hold their office during good behavior. Thus far only one justice (Associate Justice Samuel Chase in 1804) has ever been impeached, and none has ever been removed from office.

The lack of external enforcement of ethics or other conduct violations makes the Supreme Court an outlier in modern organizational best-practices. 2024 reform legislation has been blocked by congressional Republicans.

Thomas Keck argues that because the Court has historically not served as a strong bulwark for democracy, the Roberts Court had the opportunity to go down in history as a defender of democracy. However, he believes that if the court shields Trump from criminal prosecution (after ensuring his access to the ballot), then the risks that come with an anti-democratic status-quo of the current court will outweigh the dangers that come from court reform (including court packing). Aziz Z. Huq points to the blocking progress of democratizing institutions, increasing the disparity in wealth and power, and empowering an authoritarian white nationalist movement as evidence that the Supreme Court has created a "permanent minority" incapable of being defeated democratically.

In a July 2022 research paper entitled "The Supreme Court's Role in the Degradation of U.S. Democracy", the Campaign Legal Center, founded by Republican Trevor Potter, asserted that the Roberts Court "has turned on our democracy" and was on an "anti-democratic crusade" that had "accelerated and become increasingly extreme with the arrival" of Trump's three appointees. A 2024 op-ed by legal reporters Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern expressed a similar view.

Power

Michael Waldman argued that no other country gives its Supreme Court as much power. Warren E. Burger, before becoming Chief Justice, argued that since the Supreme Court has such "unreviewable power", it is likely to "self-indulge itself", and unlikely to "engage in dispassionate analysis". Larry Sabato wrote that the federal courts, and especially the Supreme Court, have excessive power. Suja A. Thomas argues the Supreme Court has taken most of the constitutionally defined power from juries in the United States for itself thanks in part to the influence of legal elites and companies that prefer judges over juries as well as the inability of the jury to defend its power.

Some members of Congress considered the results from the 2021–2022 term a shift of government power into the Supreme Court, and a "judicial coup". The 2021–2022 term of the court was the first full term following the appointment of three judges by Republican president Donald Trump — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — which created a six-strong conservative majority on the court. Subsequently, at the end of the term, the court issued a number of decisions that favored this conservative majority while significantly changing the landscape with respect to rights. These included Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization which overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey in recognizing abortion is not a constitutional right, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen which made public possession of guns a protected right under the Second Amendment, Carson v. Makin and Kennedy v. Bremerton School District which both weakened the Establishment Clause separating church and state, and West Virginia v. EPA which weakened the power of executive branch agencies to interpret their congressional mandate.

There has been debate throughout American history about the boundary between federal and state power. While Framers such as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton argued in The Federalist Papers that their then-proposed Constitution would not infringe on the power of state governments, others argue that expansive federal power is good and consistent with the Framers' wishes. The Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution explicitly states that "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

The court has been criticized for giving the federal government too much power to interfere with state authority. One criticism is that it has allowed the federal government to misuse the Commerce Clause by upholding regulations and legislation which have little to do with interstate commerce, but that were enacted under the guise of regulating interstate commerce; and by voiding state legislation for allegedly interfering with interstate commerce. For example, the Commerce Clause was used by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the Endangered Species Act, thus protecting six endemic species of insect near Austin, Texas, despite the fact that the insects had no commercial value and did not travel across state lines; the Supreme Court let that ruling stand without comment in 2005. Chief Justice John Marshall asserted Congress's power over interstate commerce was "complete in itself, may be exercised to its utmost extent, and acknowledges no limitations, other than are prescribed in the Constitution." Justice Alito said congressional authority under the Commerce Clause is "quite broad"; commentator Robert B. Reich suggests debate over the Commerce Clause continues today.

Advocates of states' rights, such as constitutional scholar Kevin Gutzman, have also criticized the court, saying it has misused the Fourteenth Amendment to undermine state authority. Justice Brandeis, in arguing for allowing the states to operate without federal interference, suggested that states should be laboratories of democracy. One critic wrote "the great majority of Supreme Court rulings of unconstitutionality involve state, not federal, law." Others see the Fourteenth Amendment as a positive force that extends "protection of those rights and guarantees to the state level."

More recently, in Gamble v. United States, the Court examined the doctrine of "separate sovereigns", whereby a criminal defendant can be prosecuted in state court as well as federal court on separate charges for the same offense.

Supreme Court of the United States

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Supreme Court of the United States

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Supreme Court of the United States across IJR

Notable quotes

Article

History

Early beginnings

From Taney to Taft

New Deal era

Burger, Rehnquist, and Roberts

Composition

Nomination, confirmation, and appointment

Tenure

Size of the court

Membership

Sitting justices

Court demographics

Judicial leanings

Retired justices

Salary

Seniority and seating

Facilities

Jurisdiction

Original jurisdiction

Appellate jurisdiction

Justices as circuit justices

Process

Case selection

Written evidence

Oral argument

Decision

Published opinions

Supreme Court bar

Term

Institutional powers

Constraints

Law clerks

Politicization of the court

Concerns and criticism

Approval ratings

Composition and selection

Ethics

Individual rights

Judicial activism

Outdated and an outlier

Power

Ruling on political questions

Secretive proceedings

Too few cases

Too slow

Leaks and inadvertent publications

Supreme Court of the United States across IJR