The Supreme Court of the United States SCOTUS

The Supreme Court is the only federal court the Constitution requires. Article III creates it in a sentence and says almost nothing else: not how many justices, not where it sits, not what it may decide beyond a short list of original cases. Congress supplied the details in the Judiciary Act of 1789, setting the Court at six justices, and the Court held its first session on February 2, 1790, in New York's Royal Exchange building with no cases to hear. The number of seats changed six times before Congress fixed it at nine in 1869, where it has stayed.

The Court's power comes almost entirely from the cases it chooses. Each year roughly seven thousand petitions arrive asking the justices to review a lower court decision. They grant about sixty to seventy. Four votes are enough to take a case under the rule of four, and the justices look for questions on which the federal circuits disagree or on which a federal law or constitutional provision needs a definitive answer. Argued cases are heard between October and April, with decisions released through the end of June. A majority of five decides, and the opinion assigned by the Chief Justice, or by the senior justice in the majority, becomes binding on every court in the country.

Justices are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, and they serve until they die, retire, or are removed by impeachment, which has been attempted once, against Samuel Chase in 1805, and failed. Since 1869 the Court has used its authority to strike down roughly 180 federal laws and more than a thousand state and local ones, a power it claimed for itself in Marbury v. Madison in 1803. The Court moved into its own building, designed by Cass Gilbert in white marble across the street from the Capitol, in 1935. Before that it sat in borrowed rooms inside the Capitol for more than a century.

No institution in American government is at once so respected and so argued over. The Court's defenders see it as the guardian of constitutional limits that majorities would otherwise ignore. Its critics, from both political directions depending on the decade, see nine unelected lawyers settling questions that belong to voters. Recent decisions on presidential immunity, agency deference, abortion, and gun rights have sharpened proposals for term limits, a binding ethics code, and changes to the Court's size, none of which has passed. John Roberts has been Chief Justice since 2005.