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The Supreme Court of the United States ( SCOTUS ) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States of America. It has ultimate (and largely discretionary) appellate jurisdiction over all federal and state court cases that involve a point of federal law, and original jurisdiction over a narrow range of cases, specifically "all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party". The Court holds the power of judicial review, the ability to invalidate a statute for violating a provision of the Constitution. It is also able to strike down presidential directives for violating either the Constitution or statutory law. However, it may act only within the context of a case in an area of law over which it has jurisdiction. The Court may decide cases having political overtones, but it has ruled that it does not have power to decide non-justiciable political questions. Established by Article Three of the United...

It was while debating the separation of powers between the legislative and executive departments that delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention established the parameters for the national judiciary. Creating a "third branch" of government was a novel idea; in the English tradition, judicial matters had been treated as an aspect of royal (executive) authority. Early on, the delegates who were opposed to having a strong central government argued that national laws could be enforced by state courts, while others, including James Madison, advocated for a national judicial authority consisting of various tribunals chosen by the national legislature. It was also proposed that the judiciary should have a role in checking the executive's power to veto or revise laws. In the end, the framers compromised by sketching only a general outline of the judiciary, vesting federal judicial power in "one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to ...

Size of the court Article III of the Constitution sets neither the size of the Supreme Court nor any specific positions on it (though the existence of the office of the chief justice is tacitly acknowledged in Article I, Section 3, Clause 6). Instead, these powers are entrusted 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 an 1801 act which would have reduced the size of the court to five members upon its next vacancy, but an 1802 act promptly negated the 1801 act, legally restoring the court's size to six members before any such vacancy occurred. As the nation's boundaries grew, Congress added justices to correspond with the growing number of judicial circuits: seven in 1807, nine in 1837, and ten in 1863. In 1866, at the behest of Chief Justice Chase and in an attempt to limit the power of Andrew Johnson, Congress passed a...

Current justices There are currently nine justices on the Supreme Court: Chief Justice John Roberts and eight associate justices. Among the current members of the Court, Clarence Thomas is the longest-serving justice, with a tenure of 10,622 days ( 29 years, 29 days) as of November 21, 2020; the most recent justice to join the court is Amy Coney Barrett, whose tenure began on October 27, 2020. Justice / birthdate and place Appointed by SCV Age at Start date / length of service Previous position or office (most recent prior to joining the Court) Succeeded Start Present John Roberts January 27, 1955 Buffalo, New York G. W. Bush 78–22 50 65 September 29, 2005 15 years, 53 days Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (2003–2005) Rehnquist Clarence Thomas June 23, 1948 Pin Point, Georgia G. H. W. Bush 52–48 43 72 October 23, 1991 29 years, 29 days Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Colum...

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 United States 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 police force separate from the Capitol Police. Located across First Street from the United States Capitol at One First Street NE and Maryland...

Congress is authorized by Article III of the federal Constitution to regulate the Supreme Court's appellate 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 g...

A term of the Supreme Court commences on the first Monday of each October, and continues until June or early July of the following year. Each term consists of alternating periods of around two weeks known as "sittings" and "recesses". Justices hear cases and deliver rulings during sittings; they discuss cases and write opinions during recesses. Case selection Nearly all cases come before the court by way of petitions for writs of certiorari, commonly referred to as "cert". The Court may review any case in the federal courts of appeals "by writ of certiorari granted upon the petition of any party to any civil or criminal case". The Court may only review "final judgments rendered by the highest court of a state in which a decision could be had" if those judgments involve a question of federal statutory or constitutional law. The party that appealed to the Court is the petitioner and the non-mover is the respondent . All case names befor...

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, as well as the meaning of any particular act proceeding from the legislative body. If there should happen to be an irrec...

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, e...

The Supreme Court has been the object of criticisms on a range of issues. Among them: Judicial activism The Supreme Court has been criticized for not keeping within Constitutional bounds by engaging in judicial activism, rather than merely interpreting law and exercising judicial restraint. Claims of judicial activism are not confined to any particular ideology. An often cited example of conservative judicial activism is the 1905 decision in Lochner v. New York , which has been criticized by many prominent thinkers, including Robert Bork, Justice Antonin Scalia, and Chief Justice John Roberts, and which was reversed in the 1930s. An often cited example of liberal judicial activism is Roe v. Wade (1973), which legalized abortion on the basis of the "right to privacy" inferred from the Fourteenth Amendment, a reasoning that some critics argued was circuitous. Legal scholars, justices, and presidential candidates have criticized the Roe decision. The progressive Brown v. Board ...