Why is it valuable for cases to work their way up the court system?
About this video
Judge Jeff Sutton explains why cases moving up through the federal courts helps produce good decisions. A case starts with one trial judge, may be reviewed by three appeals judges, then by nine Supreme Court justices, and each step adds people with different experiences. Group decision-making washes out individual biases, though the system is not perfect.
You'll be able to
- describe the three levels a federal case can move through.
- explain why more judges with different experiences can lead to better decisions.
- give examples showing the system can still make mistakes.
Key words
- Trial judge
- The single judge who runs a trial and first decides a case.
- Court of Appeals
- A federal court where a panel of three judges reviews a trial court's decision.
- Appeal
- Asking a higher court to review a decision the losing party thinks was wrong.
Transcript
Now, I will say a genius insight in the process is that it can be valuable to have quite a few cooks in the kitchen and the system works quite well from the perspective of human imperfection. We have one trial judge. You need somebody to move the case along. You can only one person running the trial, whether it's a jury trial or just a trial in front of the judge. Trial judges are very busy.
There's just an incredible amount of motions that come through them, and when they're done with a decision, the losing party can come to the Court of Appeals, and one of the nice things about that approach is we now have three judges as opposed to one looking at that problem. Three insights. That's valuable. We have three people with different experiences, appointed by different presidents, confirmed by different senates. That perspective sharing increases the prospect, in my view, of a good decision. Then after that decision, if the losing party thinks a mistake has been made, they go to the U.S Supreme Court with nine justices. You're tripling the number of insights. I think we forget this. We're so obsessed with conservative liberal, Republican, Democratic nominee.
We forget that that's just not how judges see themselves and they may have different methods of interpretation but the key thing is they have different life experiences, different experiences and judging. That's what really helps the system work, because if you have nine or three people looking at a difficult problem, they're open-minded, they're doing their work. The odds really go up, that you get to a good decision number 1, you neutralize people's world view. We're all human beings, we're going to react to fact patterns favorably or unfavorably, and that gets washed out when you have group decision-making, because there's no room for Jeff Sutton to talk to his two colleagues and say, well, there's only one way to do this, and this is my way. They'll just laugh at me.
It has to be a shared approach, one where we share insights in our own experiences. It's not perfect. It's never going to be. It's a system that produced Dred Scott and Book v. Bell, but it's also a system that produced Brown v. Board of Education. I think far more often than not, it works.
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