CREATION AND COMPOSITION
"The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office".
(Article III, US Constitution)
The Constitution elaborated neither the exact powers and prerogatives of the Supreme Court nor the organization of the Judicial Branch as a whole. Thus, it was left to Congress and to the Justices of the Court through their decisions to develop the Federal Judiciary and a body of Federal law.
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The establishment of a Federal Judiciary was a high priority for the new government, and the first bill introduced in the United States Senate became the Judiciary Act of 1789. The act divided the country into 13 judicial districts, which were, in turn, organized into three circuits: the Eastern, Middle, and Southern. The Supreme Court first assembled on February 1, 1790, in the Exchange Building in New York City -- then the Nation’s Capital. he earliest sessions of the Court were devoted to organizational proceedings. The first cases reached the Supreme Court during its second year, and the Justices handed down their first opinion on August 3, 1791 in the case of West v. Barnes.
Members of the Supreme Court are appointed by the President subject to the approval of the Senate. To ensure an independent Judiciary and to protect judges from partisan pressures, the Constitution provides that judges serve during “good Behaviour,” which has generally meant life terms. To further assure their independence, the Constitution provides that judges’ salaries may not be diminished while they are in office.
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The number of Justices on the Supreme Court changed six times before settling at the present total of nine in 1869. Since the formation of the Court in 1790, there have been only 17 Chief Justices* and 104 Associate Justices, with Justices serving for an average of 16 years. Despite this important institutional continuity, the Court has had periodic infusions of new Justices and new ideas throughout its existence; on average a new Justice joins the Court almost every two years. President Washington appointed the six original Justices and before the end of his second term had appointed four other Justices. During his long tenure, President Franklin D. Roosevelt came close to this record by appointing eight Justices and elevating Justice Harlan Fiske Stone to be Chief Justice.
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(History excerpt from the US Supreme Court website)
KEY RULINGS
Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857
Dred Scott was a slave in Missouri. From 1833 to 1843, he resided in Illinois (a free state) and in the Louisiana Territory, where slavery was forbidden by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. After returning to Missouri, Scott filed suit in Missouri court for his freedom, claiming that his residence in free territory made him a free man. After losing, Scott brought a new suit in federal court. Scott's master maintained that no “negro” or descendant of slaves could be a citizen in the sense of Article III of the Constitution. The Supreme Court decided in favor of Sandford in a 7-2 ruling.
Brown v. Board of Education, 1954
This case was the consolidation of cases arising in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and Washington D.C. relating to the segregation of public schools on the basis of race. In each of the cases, African American students had been denied admittance to certain public schools based on laws allowing public education to be segregated by race. They argued that such segregation violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The plaintiffs were denied relief in the lower courts based on Plessy v. Ferguson, which held that racially segregated public facilities were legal so long as the facilities for blacks and whites were equal. (This was known as the “separate but equal” doctrine.) In a unanimous 9-0 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that separate but equal violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Thurgood Marshall, later to become an Associate Justice, argued for the appellants.
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For a thorough evaluation of the case and its implications, CLICK HERE
Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965
In 1879, Connecticut passed a law that banned the use of any drug, medical device, or other instrument in furthering contraception. A gynecologist at the Yale School of Medicine, C. Lee Buxton, opened a birth control clinic in New Haven in conjunction with Estelle Griswold, who was the head of Planned Parenthood in Connecticut. They were arrested and convicted of violating the law, and their convictions were affirmed by higher state courts. Their plan was to use the clinic to challenge the constitutionality of the statute under the Fourteenth Amendment before the Supreme Court. In a 7-2 decision authored by Justice Douglas, the Court ruled that the Constitution did in fact protect the right of marital privacy against state restrictions on contraception. While the Court explained that the Constitution does not explicitly protect a general right to privacy, the various guarantees within the Bill of Rights create penumbras, or zones, that establish a right to privacy. Together, the First, Third, Fourth, and Ninth Amendments create the right to privacy in marital relations. The Connecticut statute conflicted with the exercise of this right and was therefore held null and void.
Roe v. Wade, 1973
In 1970, Jane Roe (a fictional name used in court documents to protect the plaintiff’s identity) filed a lawsuit against Henry Wade, the district attorney of Dallas County, Texas, where she resided, challenging a Texas law making abortion illegal except by a doctor’s orders to save a woman’s life. In her lawsuit, Roe alleged that the state laws were unconstitutionally vague and abridged her right of personal privacy, protected by the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments. In a 7-2 ruling, the Supreme Court declared that inherent in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is a fundamental “right to privacy” that protects a pregnant woman’s choice whether to have an abortion. However, this right is balanced against the government’s interests in protecting women's health and protecting “the potentiality of human life.” The Texas law challenged in this case violated this right.
Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 2005
Jessica Gonzales requested a restraining order against her estranged husband. A state trial court issued the order, which prohibited the husband from seeing Gonzales or their three daughters except during pre-arranged visits. A month later, Gonzales's husband abducted the three children. Gonzales repeatedly urged the police to search for and arrest her husband, but the police told her to wait until later that evening and see if her husband brought the children back. During the night Gonzales's husband murdered all three children and then opened fire inside a police station, where police returned fire and killed him. Gonzales brought a complaint in federal District Court, alleging that the Castle Rock police had violated her rights under the Due Process Clause of the Constitution by willfully or negligently refusing to enforce her restraining order. The Due Process Clause states: "No state shall...deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law..." The District Court dismissed the complaint, ruling that no principle of substantive or procedural due process allowed Gonzales to sue a local government for its failure to enforce a restraining order. On appeal, however, a panel of the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit found that Gonzales had a legitimate procedural due process claim. A rehearing by the full appeals court agreed, ruling that Gonzales had a "protected property interest in the enforcement of the terms of her restraining order," which the police had violated. In a 7-2 decision, the Court ruled that Gonzales had no constitutionally-protected property interest in the enforcement of the restraining order, and therefore could not claim that the police had violated her right to due process
Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, 2022
In 2018, Mississippi passed a law called the “Gestational Age Act,” which prohibits all abortions, with few exceptions, after 15 weeks’ gestational age. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the only licensed abortion facility in Mississippi, and one of its doctors filed a lawsuit in federal district court challenging the law and requesting an emergency temporary restraining order (TRO). After a hearing, the district court granted the TRO while the litigation proceeded to discovery. After discovery, the district court granted the clinic’s motion for summary judgment and enjoined Mississippi from enforcing the law, finding that the state had not provided evidence that a fetus would be viable at 15 weeks, and Supreme Court precedent prohibits states from banning abortions prior to viability. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed.
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The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, are overruled. Justice Samuel Alito authored the majority opinion of the Court. In overturning the precedent, he wrote that the Constitution does not mention abortion. The right is neither deeply rooted in the nation’s history nor an essential component of “ordered liberty.” The five factors that should be considered in deciding whether a precedent should be overruled support overruling Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey: (1) they “short-circuited the democratic process,” (2) both lacked grounding in constitutional text, history, or precedent, (3) the tests they established were not “workable,” (4) they caused distortion of law in other areas, and (5) overruling them would not upend concrete reliance interests.
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The Court ruled 6-3 that the Mississippi law should be upheld, and 5-4 that Roe should be overturned.
All case summaries above were created by oyez.org, a multimedia free law project from Cornell’s Legal Information Institute (LII), Justia, and Chicago-Kent College of Law
THE JUSTICES
Current composition of the Supreme Court is 9 justices--a Chief Justice and 8 Associate Justices. This court size is not constitutionally mandated. The first Court had 6 members, and advocates for court reform have become increasingly vocal about increasing the size again, largely in response to decisions made by an increasingly conservative majority.
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Justices are nominated by the sitting President, and then approved by the United States Senate as part of their advise and consent power. The Constitution places the power to determine the number of Justices in the hands of Congress. The first Judiciary Act, passed in 1789, set the number of Justices at six, one Chief Justice and five Associates. Over the years Congress has passed various acts to change this number, fluctuating from a low of five to a high of ten. The Judiciary Act of 1869 fixed the number of Justices at nine and no subsequent change to the number of Justices has occurred.
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Eras of court decisions are typically referred to by the name of the Chief. We are currently in the "Roberts Court, " named after Chief Justice John Roberts. He was nominated by former president George W. Bush, and has been on the court since 2005. The Reconstruction Amendments were passed by the US during the Chase Court. Roe v Wade was decided by the Burger Court.
Click HERE to meet the current justices
To explore the history of the Supreme Court through various eras and Chief Justices, click the image below to visit the Supreme Court Historical Society.
