Why does the Supreme Court choose to hear a case?

0:03What the court is typically looking for is an issue where different Federal Courts of Appeals have decided the same issue differently. That shorthand that lawyers use or law clerks use is a circuit split. If the Fifth Circuit down in Texas decides an issue one way, the Ninth Circuit out in California decides the issue the other way. There's a split in the circuits. That's what the Supreme Court is most looking for when it looks at a case that is filed and asked the court for review.

0:37Just to be clear about this, one of the things that really makes the Supreme Court very different from other courts is they have what we think of as discretionary jurisdiction. They don't have to take every case that somebody wants to appeal to the Supreme Court. If you lose in the trial court, which in the Federal System is called the district court, you have an absolute right to appeal to the Court of Appeals. But if you lose in the Court of Appeals, you have an absolute right to ask the Supreme Court to hear your case. That's called a Cert Petition or a petition for Certiorari, but they do not have any obligation to say, yes, we want to hear your case. The Supreme Court gets about 10,000 of those cert petitions every year, and it only takes somewhere between 60-75 cases a year. If you do the math, that's less than 1% chance. Mostly they're looking for circuit splits. Occasionally, they will just find an issue super interesting or

1:34an issue that's very important for the federal court system as a whole.