Majesty of the Law Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice

CHAPTER ONE What's It Like? What is it like working at the supreme court? Because I never dreamed that I would end up where I am, I had no preconceived ideas about the job upon arriving for work the first day. I had not been admitted to practice before the Court. The first argument I ever witnessed in the Supreme Court was one that I considered as a member of the Court justice. My guess is that such experiences were not uncommon for new Justices, at least until more recent years. All I knew was that the job would be a tremendous undertaking. I had no specific ideas about the mechanics of being a Justice, however, or what the decision-making process on the Court was really like. I hoped that I had the basic ability and could develop the skills not only to do the job but to do it well in order that not only women but most citizens would think that the President had made a good choice. There is one custom we have on the Court that was a pleasant surprise to me and that I treasure. Each day when there is oral argument, just before we go out on the bench, and each day before we confer, every Justice shakes the hand of every other Justice. To an outsider, this may seem baroque and unnecessary, but you must realize we are a very small group. We see and interact with one another often, and we all know we will continue to do so for the rest of our professional lives. It is important that we get along together so we can go along together. The one-page memo and the color-coded distribution sheet have yet to reach the Supreme Court. Indeed, the Court is a more reliable backstop for the health of the paper industry than any protectionist legislation Congress might pass. A Justice is by protocol allowed to make a grocery list without making eight copies to distribute around the Court, but pretty much everything else is done not only on paper but with copies for every other Justice to read as well. Petitions asking the Court to grant review of a case come to us throughout the year from both the federal and the state court systems. And they come in significant numbers. We now receive more than seven thousand applications a year. Many call but few are chosen; the Court accepts for full review with briefing and oral argument no more than one hundred or so cases for each year's term. In addition, the Court summarily decides up to another hundred or so cases without oral argument and full briefing. In making this drastic culling, the Court has relatively few hard and fast rules to guide or restrict its decisions. We follow an unwritten policy that it takes the agreement of at least four Justices to accept a case. With each petition we consider the importance of the issue, how likely it is to recur in various courts around the country, and the extent to which other courts considering the issue have reached conflicting holdings on it. My own evaluation of the applications is based on what I believe to be the primary role of the Court: with fifty separate state-court systems and thirteen federal circuits, our task is to try to develop a reasonably uniform and consistent body of federal law. Petitions seeking full-scale review in cases posing a genuine conflict among the lower courts on an important issue of federal law obviously are much more likely to garner the required number of votes to grant the petition than are petitions in cases where the lower courts are generally in agreement on the legal issue in the case. Each year the members of the Court must read the briefs in the one hundred or so cases on which the Court hears oral arguments. After argument, each case has to be decided and explained in a published opinion. During the weeks of oral arguments The Justices confer after the arguments are heard. This is where we learn how each Justice thinks the case should be resolved and why. Based on this discussion, writing assignments are made for the case. IfO'Connor, Sandra Day is the author of 'Majesty of the Law Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice', published 2004 under ISBN 9780812967470 and ISBN 081296747X.