What has the Supreme Court done for you lately? As lawyers, we watch with amusement, as the media proclaims how the Supreme Court ruled this way or that, when they did nothing of the sort! We started to notice that often our friends were believing what the news said! So here we go - Supreme Court 101 and how the court really works and what their rulings mean.
First up, let’s talk about how a case gets to the Supreme Court. Take a note that almost everything we say here is a generalization, because there are a million variations and exceptions to everything!
First there had to be a state law or action that somebody said violated the U.S Constitution or federal law. There are three levels of state courts and usually the case will have to go through all three state levels before it even gets to the federal level. Then, there’s 3 federal levels with the Supreme Court at the top. The Supreme Court can even choose NOT to take a case! Usually all levels after the first one are simply a review of what the lower court did, not a fresh look at the case.
What this means is that when cases get to the Supreme Court they are decided on the narrowest of issues, and often these issues are technical ones rather than issues that go to the real substance such as “Should abortion be legal?”, “Is it wrong to make a voter show ID?” etc. Yet the media often reports the Supreme Court’s rulings as being in favor of position when it has nothing to do with a position being right or wrong.
Also, lately we find the media reporting that courts in general are dismissing cases when they are just denying particular motions. Think of it this way. A case is a war, and, in that war, different “motions” are brought which ask the court to do specific things. These are the “battles”. In a lot of the election cases that are being filed, they are asking – by motion – for the count to be stopped. This request is called an injunction. The courts thus far have denied these requests but have not dismissed the cases themselves – which often means even that request will go up to the next level.
As far as what cases really stand for, let us take the famous Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Store case. The media reported this as a case that upheld freedoms for religious entities to deny health coverage of contraceptives to their employees. Yet the Supreme Court did not really address religious freedom or even conception in their ultimate ruling! What the Supreme Court was actually deciding was whether a corporation was a “person” under a certain federal statute, also known as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the funny thing is, in a definitional section of the statute, it included “corporations” as a “person”!
We can cite hundreds of cases as far back as Roe v. Wade. The basis of Roe v. Wade and why certain legal scholars think it should be overturned usually is about two technical issues regarding the initial court findings: whether the plaintiff had “standing” (the right to even bring the suit) and whether a certain decision was beyond the Court’s power (deciding criteria for the first 3 months of pregnancy when “Jane Doe” hadn’t established she was at this stage when she filed her case).
Let’s take another election example. A case is pending in Pennsylvania where they are claiming a violation of the equal protection clause of the Constitution, stating that due to guidance from the state’s top election official, counties were told they could share information with political parties about voters whose ballots had problems (allowing those voters to correct them). The claim is that largely democrat counties gave their democrat voters the ability to correct their messed up ballots where in the largely republican counties, the officials would not give the information to the party because they believed the “guidance” was improper. This one is moving quickly through the courts and as of writing this is about to go to the second tier of the federal level – in this case the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. If and when it gets to the Supreme court, the real issue before the Court is likely to be something as simple as what is meant by the terms of the “Elections Clause” - the part of the Constitution that states, “The times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof”. The question may simply be whether that top official’s “guidance” was an action that was not hers to make.
It is also interesting what each of the individual justices actually do and what the media attributes to them. Take the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), case, United State v. Windsor. DOMA stated, that under federal law, the words "marriage" and "spouse" refer to legal unions between one man and one woman. Our U.S. legislature passed it in 1996. The Windsor case was filed in 2010 and by 2011 both the President and the Attorney General stated they would not defend the law. Chief Justice John G. Roberts wrote the dissent in that case (joined by others) largely arguing that the Court lacked the “jurisdiction” to review the case – because it was no longer a real case because the government was no longer was defending it. Roberts was simply enforcing one of the simplest laws involving the court – that there be a real dispute before them, yet the media at the time reported Roberts as being in favor of the Act itself – an untrue statement.
We know this is all so complicated! The key to remember is that the media does a really poor job in advising the public about how legal cases really work, so don’t believe what they say! So, what do you do? I think the best way is to look at the actual court opinions. Get them online and you will usually see right at the beginning a synopsis of the actual ruling. Google any legalese you don’t understand and after a bit, you’ll have a decent understanding of the terms because the same ones come up over and over. There’s a majority opinion and often you’ll find a dissent (statement of why the others disagreed). Sometimes you will even get other variations like additional dissents or agreeing with the majority, but for different reasons. Ruth Bader Ginsberg was known as the “Great Dissenter.” Now you know that this means that she was often on minority side of a decision but wrote strong decisions why she felt differently than the majority!