The Court Of The Supreme Court

The Supreme Court, which sees almost 150 petitions per week, called cert petitions, must carefully select the cases that they want to spend their time and effort on (Savage 981). If they didn’t select them carefully, the nine justices would quickly be overrun, so they have put in place a program to weed through the court cases to pick out the small number they will discuss. There are a few criteria that are used to judge whether or not a case will be tried. The first is whether or not the lower courts decided the case based on another one of the Supreme Court’s decisions for they will investigate these in order to withhold or draw back their conclusion that they made in their court case. Another is the case’s party alignment: sometimes the justices will pick cases that will align with their party beliefs, like trying to get a death row inmate off of his death sentence. They also make claims about the “life” of the case- the Supreme Court only hears “live” cases- they do not try to go back in time and re-mark a case that has long since been decided (Savage 981). Lastly, they like to take cases where the lower courts did not decide with one another -these cases can have t o do with interpretations of the law that have been left up to the lower courts and should be specifically defined by the Supreme Court (Savage 982).
The process of the judging on this criteria goes like this: First, a business or organization that loses an appeal in the Us court system, they are allowed to file a petition, called a “cert petition” (Savage 981). These petitions explain in thirty pages or less the process, views, and decision of the case. These are then given to the Law Clerks, who create a “cert memo”. This is created when the Clerk rea...

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... was not accepted by many of the Court Justices. One of the Concurring decisions was that because the information, which was acquired through the Stored Communications Act needed to be obtained with a warrant, the Stored Communications Act was Unconstitutional. This was argued because, for ISP’s to collect information about everyone that uses there services, they would have to present a warrant to everyone who they serve, and they didn 't yet have probable cause. The case ended in a decision that the government had infringed on Warshak’s 4th amendment rights, and that any obtaining of information through the Stored Communications Act (deemed legal) would have to be obtained with a warrant. This upheld Katz v. US to say that because Warshak used a private means of communication for his correspondence, a warrant must have been obtained to ask the ISP for the emails.