SCOTUS declining to hear

December 9, 2006 6:11 AM

SCOTUS filter: Why does the Supreme Court decline to hear cases?

Obviously, there is no one answer to this. Are the reasons stricly legal? What are legal reasons for declining a case? Are there politcal reasons? e.g. would a court that leans to the right decline to hear a gay rights case for fear of opening a pandora's box?

Also, who decides which cases to hear? All of the justices or just the chief?

posted by allelopath to law & government (14 comments total)

There's a pretty good explanation here.
posted by purephase at 6:21 AM on December 9, 2006

Deciding to Decide is a very interesting book on this subject. There are very few kinds of cases anymore that the Supreme Court must accept on mandatory appeal. Instead it decides whether to issue a writ of certiorari using the Rule of four. They are more likely to do so if lower circuits have made opposed rulings on the same issue.

Perry argues that justices will frequently vote not to accept a case that they think will lead to a judgment they'll disagree with.

The Supreme Court also handles original jurisdiction cases that are brought by states against each other, which do not start in lower courts.
posted by grouse at 6:26 AM on December 9, 2006

Previously on AskMe.
posted by Jaltcoh at 6:33 AM on December 9, 2006

I assume this question is partially motivated by this NYTimes article (reg. req.), but if it's not, you might find it interesting in that it summarizes some of the above statements. One reason they don't seem to mention is the simple fact that if you're getting 8000 appeals and you can only physically take a max of about 200, why not only take 150? or 100? or 70?

This is especially the case when you think about the justices. The average age of the justices is over 66, and if you take out the two newest appointees, that number jumps to almost 70. John Paul Stevens is 86.

Then think about what they're paid. The eight associate justices make $194k; the chief makes $205k. While this is a lot to you or me, the plain truth is that anyone with the qualifications necessary to get on the court could make 2-10x that in a heartbeat by moving to the academic or private sector. For an example of one such person making that exact switch, see here (appeals court judge overlooked for SCOTUS gives up his $171k salary to take a job paying $800k plus a $900k bonus).

So what you effectively end up with, then, is an elderly, underpaid group of people that gets to set its own workload. Honestly, I'm amazed they still take 70.
posted by Partial Law at 6:55 AM on December 9, 2006

The vast majority of cert petitions (I'd say 7/8ths) are totally without merit. Out of the remaining 1000 or so, it's easy to narrow down a pool of cases that have a good shot. At that point, it's easy to say why a case got granted, but hard to explain why one got denied.

One of the key factors that makes something "certworthy" is where the little guy won a sweeping victory below with a big impact on the law in general, and that doesn't happen as much as it used to. (The New York Times article points this out.) When those cases do come along these days, you can almost guarantee they'll be granted. For example, Hein v. Freedom from Religion [PDF], where the plaintiffs won a really important procedural case giving them the right to sue the government. Another example would be the cases on state tax benefits to big business from last year -- DaimlerChrysler v. Cuno.
posted by footnote at 8:43 AM on December 9, 2006

Breaking it down:

Are the reasons stricly legal?

No.

What are legal reasons for declining a case?

Among others,

(1) No standing. You haven't shown that you've suffered a harm that needs fixin'
(2) Not a justicible question. For your problem, talk to a legislature, not the SC. If they won't give you what you want, tough shit.
(3) No federal question. You're not raising any questions the SC, as a federal court, can answer.
(4) Settled law. If lower courts rule consistently on this issue, and the SC ruled previously in the same way, the SC is unlikely to hear that case.

Are there politcal reasons? e.g. would a court that leans to the right decline to hear a gay rights case for fear of opening a pandora's box?

Sure.

Also, who decides which cases to hear? All of the justices or just the chief?

All of them. Any four can force a case to the Court.

Their most common method of hearing cases is called a writ of certiorari. The court issues such a writ if four justices want to hear the case.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 8:59 AM on December 9, 2006

In practice, basic legal questions of standing and justiciability aren't the big ones that come up when the Court is reviewing cert petitions. They're more likely to come up later at the merits stage.

The main legal questions at the cert stage are usually about appealability. The decision from the court below should be be "final" -- meaning that the Supreme Court isn't interrupting the lower court in the middle of lower court's hearing of the case. This isn't even a hard and fast rule in all cases.
posted by footnote at 10:02 AM on December 9, 2006

If the case is one which is of significant public interest, and a close one on constitituional analysis, the Court will often

1. decide to take it for that reason, or
2. decline to take it for that reason.

What happened at the Court of Appeals level is often a significant tipping factor. If the majority of the Justices would affirm, they might well decide to deny cert and let the Court of Appeals ruling stand. That gives them cover in politically sensitive areas.
posted by yclipse at 11:49 AM on December 9, 2006

To chime in, even though a lot of the factors have been said already, based on what Antonio Scalli (sp?) mentioned on an interview on C-SPAN, the fact if it's been covered in previous cases before affects if it gets picked up or not.

He said, for instance, "We have really firm ground on what the First Amendment is..." and he went on to mention how there are other things, like aspects of business law, that really don't have that firmness.

What I'm trying to say is that if it's been done before or not affects it.
posted by champthom at 12:12 PM on December 9, 2006

thanks for the comments.
posted by allelopath at 2:49 PM on December 9, 2006

Nearly all of the comments so far are completely off-base, and some of them are seriously wrong. The Supreme Court actually has a rule of procedure that explains when they will grant certiorari. The language of the rule is broad enough to allow for some flexibility, but if we are going to start discussing when and why the Court grants cert, we might as well begin with the basics. Here is the applicable rule:

Rule 10. Considerations Governing Review on Writ of Certiorari

Review on a writ of certiorari is not a matter of right, but of judicial discretion. A petition for a writ of certiorari will be granted only for compelling reasons. The following, although neither controlling nor fully measuring the Court's discretion, indicate the character of the reasons the Court considers:

(a) a United States court of appeals has entered a decision in conflict with the decision of another United States court of appeals on the same important matter; has decided an important federal question in a way that conflicts with a decision by a state court of last resort; or has so far departed from the accepted and usual course of judicial proceedings, or sanctioned such a departure by a lower court, as to call for an exercise of this Court's supervisory power;
(b) a state court of last resort has decided an important federal question in a way that conflicts with the decision of another state court of last resort or of a United States court of appeals;
(c) a state court or a United States court of appeals has decided an important question of federal law that has not been, but should be, settled by this Court, or has decided an important federal question in a way that conflicts with relevant decisions of this Court.
A petition for a writ of certiorari is rarely granted when the asserted error consists of erroneous factual findings or the misapplication of a properly stated rule of law.

To summarize, under the Rule the Court will usually hear a case if there is a conflict between state courts or federal courts of appeals on a federal question of law, or if there are extraordinary circumstances.
posted by esquire at 6:05 PM on December 9, 2006

Esquire, while I agree that Rule 10 is a useful contribution to the answer, I'm not sure I'd go so far as to tell the poster that nearly every other answer is "completely off-base" or "seriously wrong." As rules of procedure go, Rule 10 is about as open-ended as you can get. It starts out by saying three different ways that the court can pretty much do what it wants, then uses a bunch of subjective language to describe how the court will make that decision ("important," "erroneous," "so far departed," etc.)

It also doesn't include many of the institutional systems that have developed, like the above-mentioned "Rule of Four" or the clerking pool discussed in the NYTimes article, which do not appear in any formal rules.

Therefore, while Rule 10 is a great way to see why the court does take certain cases, many of the above answers illustrate some of the factors contributing to why it does not take so many others.
posted by Partial Law at 6:23 AM on December 10, 2006

Esquire: Rule 10 spells out the main discretionary factors behind a grant, but it doesn't explain the answer to Allelopath's question about why cases get denied. That's a much harder question to answer and often a mystery to even the most seasoned court watchers.

Rule 10 is not a rule of obligatory procedure, and it's definitely not true that the Court "will usually hear a case if there is a conflict between state courts or federal courts of appeals on a federal question of law." If that were the case, then the docket would have many, many more cases granted than it does now. I know this because I read every paid cert petition filed last year, and I'd say at least 200 of them involved some degree of conflict between courts. That doesn't even take into account the thousands of unpaid IFP (prisoner) petitions, which I imagine would add up to at least another couple of hundered of real conflicts. If you don't believe me, then go to the charts Scotusblog makes of certworthy petitions, and see that only maybe 1 in 5 of those ever gets granted.
posted by footnote at 8:26 AM on December 10, 2006

On postview, what Partial Law said!
posted by footnote at 8:29 AM on December 10, 2006