The United States Supreme Court is an example of a traditional way of being heard by the government when you feel that your state court has failed you, or you have exhausted all your options on the state level and so escalate your case to the federal level to hopefully gain correct and proper justice. The Supreme Court hears cases brought before them in several different ways. Most are done by petition for a “writ of certiorari”, which means it’s been accepted and may proceed to review. A second method is through appeal from decisions of district courts in certain cases involving the division of congressional or state legislative districts, or when specifically given permission in a statute. Another path to federal court is petition for an "extraordinary writ" such as mandamus, prohibition, or habeas corpus. These are usually granted by lower courts. In 1789, The Supreme Court was instituted by the third article of the Constitution, which also gave Congress the capacity to create lower ranking federal courts. With the Judiciary Act of 1789, the legislative branch used this newfound power to allow Congress to determine how they wanted to run the Court. The act was put into …show more content…
Senate rejects or accepts them. The first Supreme Court was made up of Chief Justice John Jay, and Associate Justices Robert Harrison, John Blair, John Rutledge, William Cushing, and James Wilson. The present Supreme Court consists of Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr. (Conservative) and Associate Justices Anthony Kennedy (Conservative, nominated by Reagan), Clarence Thomas (Conservative, nominated by H.W. Bush), Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Strong Liberal, appointed by Clinton), Stephen Breyer (Democrat, appointed by Clinton), Samuel Alito (Republican, nominated by W. Bush), Sonia Sotomayor(Strong Liberal, Obama) , Elena Kagan (Democrat, nominated by Obama) and Neil Gorsuch (conservative, appointed by