The Founding Era - Supreme Court

 

After reviewing Part I and Part II of the Supreme Court video, I learned several things about the Supreme Court that I did not know previously. I did not know that the average term of  a Justice on the Supreme Court is 16 years, with many serving even longer terms. I also learned that some members of the Supreme Court say that it takes 3-5 years of being a Justice to get used to it and to be able to do the job well. I was also unaware of the Dred Scott decision that deemed Congress had no power to ban slavery, a decision that is considered the court’s greatest self inflicted wound. One more important thing I learned about the Supreme Court from this video is that they receive about 7000 cases annually, and only accept about 100. 

The most important take-away point is the fact that the supreme court today has 200 years of history to view and acquire wisdom from. This makes the reviewing of the constitution both easy and hard. Another key takeaway is that it does not matter who you are when appealing to the Supreme Court, all cases they received are reviewed. The example used in the video is a prisoner writing his case by hand from his cell. This goes along with the most surprising thing that I learned from this video, which is the fact that each Justice decides their cases individually. As one of them stated in the video, they do their own work. I always thought that the Supreme Court all gathered with each other at the same time to decide cases, which is not the truth.

 I used to view the Supreme Court as extremely secretive, but after watching this video, I can safely say that is not the case anymore.  As one of the Justices in the video states, “a court has no secrets”...”the inside story of a court is there is no inside story”. Also, the judges have to wait for cases to be presented to them, they cannot propose solutions to problems the way other political figures can. This makes the Supreme Court seem more noble, considering they are willing to make decisions that no one else can.