The Founding Era & The Idea of America

General knowledge of the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court of the United States is the most powerful judicial branch on the entire earth. The Supreme Court interprets the U.S. Constitution, safeguarding liberty, preserving the union, and upholding the rule of law. In the entire United States history, there has been just over 100 Supreme Court justices, serving an average of 16 years. Most Supreme Court justices, however, usually serve until they die which is incredible because it shows the justices' passion and drive to serve in the judicial branch on the Supreme Court. 

What you found most interesting?

What I found extremely interesting is how many new cases the Supreme Court receives a week and it made me appreciate the Supreme Court justices even more because of how busy their days, weeks and months are because of the constant new cases filing into their offices and chambers by the day and week. The video said the Supreme Court receives more than 100 new cases every single week and about a total of 7,000 a year which is astonishing. What is even crazier to me is that the Supreme Court only accepts about 100 of those 7,000 cases to be fully considered a year. When a case is presented before the court, the court is public and lawyers on each side are only allowed 30 minutes to present their cases to the court. I didn't know that after a case opinion was made, the copies of the opinions are released to the press. Usually the opinions of the court were pages among pages long, and journalists had to go through each and every line of every single page and summarize and explain what the court decided within the case and the reasons behind those decisions.

Biggest takeaway from video and how did the video change the way of how I thought about the Supreme Court?

It is crazy how much power nine individuals have on the entire country as they decide the results to hundreds of cases across the entire country that dictate the function of our country. I gained so much respect after watching these two videos of the Supreme Court justices because of the amount of pressure and workload that each chief justice has in their hands. It's even crazier that most of the Supreme Court justices are at the age where they could retire, but are instead working tirelessly every single day to review case files. The justices are flooded with an enormous amount of crucial and important workload daily, something that I was kind of unaware of. The most important takeaway point about the Supreme Court is that they have the most important duty of giving each case that is presented to their chambers an equal and fair opportunity. It must be incredibly challenging going through 100 new cases of pages on pages long every week and over 7,000 new cases a year and figuring out which cases deserve a shot at being handled in the court. I feel like the nine Supreme Court justices do not get talked about as much as I think they should be because their job is all about not being biased in a world full of biased individuals. That is incredibly hard to do is to remain unbiased and remain fair and equal even though it sounds like something that should already be known and done.