How Cases Get to the Supreme Court

Each year, the Supreme Court receives thousands of requests to consider cases on appeal, and only a small fraction are granted. The process is shaped as much by the Court’s role in managing its docket and selecting cases as by the legal questions at issue.

Currently, the Supreme Court issues signed decisions on about 60 cases per year. That’s down from more than 160 in the 1980s and significantly lower than the number of cases decided just 15 years ago. Most of these cases are on technical legal questions and don’t make headlines. But others have tremendous ramifications for the country on a wide range of issues, such as voting rights, environmental regulation, government accountability, and gun rights. That’s why it’s important to understand how the Supreme Court hears the cases that it does.

Virtually all Supreme Court cases arrive from lower federal and state supreme courts.

Most Supreme Court cases come from U.S. circuit courts of appeals, which sit one level below the Supreme Court and review decisions from federal district courts. There are circuit courts covering 12 geographic regions — for example, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit — plus a Federal Circuit for certain types of cases on topics such as patents and international trade. In 2024, almost three-quarters of all petitions to the Supreme Court came from these circuit courts.

The U.S. Supreme Court can also review cases from state supreme courts when they decide questions of federal law, such as when they rule in cases involving federal statutes or federal constitutional rights.

Additionally, Congress has authorized direct Supreme Court review of federal trial court rulings in a narrow set of cases. In these limited situations, federal law provides that cases can bypass the courts of appeals. Although rare, these cases are often high-profile because they typically involve issues like redistricting or voting rights decided by special three-judge district courts.

Importantly, the Supreme Court primarily decides questions of law rather than determining facts. In most cases, lower courts establish the factual record and frame the legal issues, and the Supreme Court reviews how the law was applied to those facts.

A small number of cases start in the Supreme Court instead of on appeal.

The Constitution gives the Supreme Court original jurisdiction over certain cases, which means that it hears these cases in the first instance and in the capacity of a trial court. Original jurisdiction cases are most often disputes between states. These rare cases usually involve technical matters such as boundary lines or water rights. There have been fewer than 20 such cases between 2000 and 2026. Even then, the Court often appoints a special master to gather facts before the justices decide the legal issues.

The Supreme Court chooses almost all of its cases.

For the vast majority of cases, the only way to reach the Supreme Court is by filing a petition for a writ of certiorari, also known as a cert petition, after a federal circuit court or a state supreme court has ruled. Certiorari is Latin for “to be more fully informed,” and when the Court takes a case it’s known as “granting certiorari.”

Cert petitions come from a variety of parties for a variety of reasons. The federal government, state and local governments, advocacy groups, businesses, and individuals may all appeal to the Supreme Court to overturn a lower court’s decision. Some parties, especially advocacy groups, may file lawsuits with particular plaintiffs and facts because they believe it will offer them a chance to eventually bring an issue before the Supreme Court, especially when justices have indicated openness to establishing new precedent in their favor.   

A cert petition outlines the specific legal questions the Court should consider and arguments as to why the case deserves review, such as highlighting that the legal question at issue is of national importance, or that there is a disagreement among federal appeals courts on a legal question for the Court to resolve, known as a “circuit split.” However, the Court’s decision could go beyond the issues the litigant raises.

The opposing party may respond with a brief explaining why the Court should not take the case. Third parties such as advocacy groups and academics might also file friend-of-the-court briefs arguing that the Court should or should not accept a case for review.

Cert petitions span the gamut of lower court cases, which can include everything from civil suits between private parties (such as individuals and businesses) to criminal cases to lawsuits challenging state and government policies. From this cert docket, the Court tends to look for cases involving important constitutional questions or significant federal laws, especially those affecting civil rights or the separation of powers. It also is more likely to hear cases when review is requested by the federal government, which is involved in approximately two-thirds of all the cases the U.S. Supreme Court decides on the merits each year.

The Court typically hears cases on appeal from an appellate court’s decision. In a small but growing number of cases, the Court hears cases directly from federal district courts, before the federal appellate court has had a chance to rule. This may happen in cases where the justices consider the topic unusually pressing or where it makes sense to bundle the case with another one the Court already plans to take up.

Cert petitions must meet detailed formatting and content requirements. Once submitted, they enter an internal screening process that is largely invisible to the public.

While each justice has discretion to review cert petitions, all are first reviewed by law clerks. This is the stage where upwards of 97 percent of appeals are filtered out, never to be considered by the justices themselves. For the rest, the clerks summarize each case and recommend whether the Court should grant review. These memos are circulated to justices who participate in the “cert pool.” Currently, seven justices participate in the cert pool process, while the clerks of Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch review the petitions on their own and make separate recommendations directly. All of the justices then discuss the cases in private conferences.

At this stage, there are three possibilities. The Court can grant certiorari if at least four justices vote to take on a case — the Court then sets a schedule for the parties to submit briefs and later sets a date for oral argument. Or it can deny certiorari, leaving the lower court’s ruling in place. Or it can issue a summary reversal, in which six or more Justices vote to overturn a lower court’s decision without full briefing or argument, such as when the lower court has failed to apply proper precedent. This last tool is used very rarely — fewer than 10 times per year in the last few decades.

While the results of cert votes are public, the actual breakdown of how the justices voted is not. An individual justice’s vote typically only becomes public if they choose to write or sign onto an opinion dissenting from the Court’s decision on whether to take a case.

Numerous factors go into whether the Court takes a case, but cert decisions rarely come with an explanation.

Supreme Court justices can have various reasons for choosing to grant or deny cert. They may support it because they believe that a case was wrongly decided or will provide an opportunity to clarify a precedent that has been misapplied or to resolve circuit splits. Sometimes, justices may be looking for an opportunity to move the law in a particular direction and vote to take up cases they believe offer the best prospects of convincing a majority of colleagues to join them in doing so.

Though justices do not have to provide opinions for supporting or opposing cert, occasionally, one will write an opinion explaining their vote. These opinions reveal that justices who oppose cert do not necessarily do so because they agree with the lower court, but may instead be considering such factors as how a case fits with others on the docket or whether an issue may benefit from further development in lower courts.

The Supreme Court can also fast-track certain cases by using the “shadow docket.”

Parties in a case can also file an application to the Supreme Court’s emergency docket, also known as the shadow docket, typically requesting that the Court temporarily block a lower court’s order. These applications follow a different process from cert petitions. Each federal circuit is assigned a “circuit justice” who reviews emergency applications and can refer them for review to the whole Court. A majority of the justices can then vote to put the lower court’s decision on hold.

The increasing frequency of these decisions and the lack of transparency surrounding them has led to the rise of the term “shadow docket” to describe the emergency applications process. The Court rules on these applications on an unpredictable timeline, often with little to no briefing or oral arguments, and is not required to provide written opinions explaining their reasoning.

The Court does not need to indicate which justices voted to block a lower court’s action, although it is sometimes possible to deduce that information based on which justices, if any, file dissenting opinions.

Historically, the shadow docket has been dominated by death penalty cases, but in recent years, the Supreme Court has increasingly made shadow docket rulings on controversial policy issues. This partly reflects the fact that the Trump administration has filed more emergency petitions than any prior administration. Between March 2025 and 2026 alone, the Court has considered more than 30 such applications from the administration and ruled in its favor 80 percent of the time, usually without oral arguments and with little or no explanation. That’s as many as the Biden administration filed across its full four years and more than twice as many as the Obama and George W. Bush administrations filed across their combined 16 years.

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The Supreme Court’s case selection process matters. Because it hears so few cases, its choices about which disputes to review often impact the direction of the law as much as its eventual rulings.