The Supreme Court

Today in class we watched a video about the Supreme Court. It digs deeper into the Supreme Court and gave viewers an inside perspective to the justices who work there. Here's what I learned.

The Supreme Court oversees the Appeal Court, who tries the law. When someone doesn't feel that they got a fair trial in Appeal Court, they take it to Supreme Court. Because the Supreme Court is certiorari, in which it has the power to pick and choose which cases it will take to trial, many cases are denied. In order to decide which cases they'd like to pursue and which ones they won't, the justices meet in a conference room and privately discuss with one another. Once their discussion is over and they've come to an overall decision, the judges send their opinion statements-explaining the legal reasons for the decision- in. Their opinion statements are revised and released to the press.

I also learned about the major role that John Marshall played in introducing judicial review in the Supreme Court. Judicial Review gives the power of the court to review all actions in all parts of government and deem them constitutional or not. This is a large part of what the Supreme Court is today, so without John Marshall, they would have no judicial review.

To sum it up, the Supreme Court's job is to interpret our 200 year old constitution and apply it to today's problems. My favorite quote from the video was from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. When discussing the constitution and what it meant when it was written compared to what it means now, Ginsburg states, "We don't have the constitution that was written in 1787 or 1791 when the Bill of Rights was added... remember that 'We the people' was composed of a very small part of the people in fact, inhabiting these shores. No woman could vote, people were held in bondage, Native Americans were not treated as citizens of equal stature and dignity. So, those people do count among 'We the people' our constitution embraces today."

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