[♪INTRO] If you’re an engaged citizen of the US, or, god forbid, you get push notifications of the news on your phone, you hear a lot
about what our president is doing, or what Congress isn’t doing, every day, all the
time. But if that’s how you’re staying informed
about how our government works and what that means for you, you’re only getting two thirds
of the story. I wanna talk about the federal court system—the
part of out of government that figures out how our laws apply to our real lives. Except... what even are the courts? How do they fall into the big picture of US
government, and how did it get this way? [♪MUSIC] To start our journey of knowing the things we should know, let’s go back to basics. In the US we have three branches of government. The legislative branch, or Congress, comes
up with laws, the executive branch, the president, gets to sign or veto those laws, and the judicial
branch, our federal court system, interprets what the laws actually mean. This all comes from the Constitution – another pretty major thing that the court is tasked with interpreting – where our
founding fathers decided that there needed to be a separation of powers because they
didn’t want the US to feel like the monarchy they had just fought so hard to leave. The idea was that if any branch tried to take
a little too much power, the other branches could be like, “Hey, that's our job. Get back in your lane.” So Article I lays out the powers and responsibilities
of Congress, Article II talks about what the president can and can’t do, and Article
III says that “The Judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme
Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and
establish.” Basically: we’re gonna have one, big, powerful
court. And probably other courts, but we’ll figure
that out later. It’s the shortest, and kinda the fuzziest
description of powers of all the branches of government. It left out all the details about who sits
on the courts, and how many courts there should even be, leaving all of that up to Congress
to decide. And like most of the American experiment,
we’ve been making it up as we go along. In the first ever session of Congress, lawmakers
passed the Judiciary Act of 1789 which spelled out how the whole federal court system would
work. Remember that ordaining and establishing part? Congress figured out that one Supreme Court
might not be enough for, y’know, a whole nation, so they decided there should be three
levels of federal courts, with the Supreme Court being the highest. That’s how we got district courts. These are the lowest level of the federal
court system where trials about federal law actually happen with one judge, a jury, witnesses,
the whole deal. There were originally 13 district courts—one
for every state at the time with an extra court in both Virginia and Massachusetts because
they had bigger populations. But now we have a lot more states, and a LOT
more cases, so there are a total of 94 districts today. If you go to district court and you don’t agree
with the result of that trial, you can appeal it to the next court up, which, helpfully,
is called the United States Court of Appeals. I love it when the names make sense. These are the 13 courts, each serving a different
region, or circuit, of the US, where you can ask higher, more powerful judges to reverse
the decisions of the district court. Appealing is kind of like asking the district
court if you can, like, borrow their car and they say no, so you go ask your other parent... the appellate court instead. In the Court of Appeals, a panel of three
judges from the region reviews your case, and they can decide to either uphold or overturn
the district court’s decision. Sidenote on the Court of Appeals—you may
have also heard it called the circuit court, and there's a reason for that. In the original court system from 1789, the
Supreme Court justices “rode circuit,” traveling around from district to district
to hear trials in lower courts, which was kind of a lot of work because planes weren’t
a thing. The Supreme Court justices were like hey,
Congress, we’re doing a lot of traveling here, and we’re tired, and also it’s dangerous? Like, riding the circuit court trail sounds
like a really cool idea until one of your 6 judges dies of dysentery. So in 1891 they got rid of the traveling,
and took away their responsibility to hear appeals by creating a new court above the
circuit court—yep, it’s the Court of Appeals again. And in the Judicial Code of 1911, Congress
moved their trials down to the district courts and got rid of circuit courts all together. If you go to District Court, and then appeal
that decision, and then the Court of Appeals upholds it, and you want to appeal that decision,
you’ve got to go all the way to the Supreme Court—the final boss of the federal court
system. The Judiciary act of 1789 gave the Supreme
Court 6 justices. Yeah, only six, we added more later. It also decided that the Supreme Court had
the ability to hear cases before any of the other courts, known as original jurisdiction, if
those cases didn’t fit in the lower courts, usually when a case was a dispute between
two states. But their most important function, and the
majority of what the Supreme Court did, and still does, is hear appeals. When the court was first created, they were
required to issue decisions on all appeals from lower courts, but that was a lot of cases
that they had to review—whether they thought it deserved a review or not. So, nearly 100 years after the Supreme Court
was created, Congress came up with certiorari—a system to decide which cases the court will
review, otherwise they might still be hearing cases about whether tomatoes are a fruit or
a vegetable. Yes. that was a real Supreme Court case. Once the appellate court issues a decision,
either party to that case can petition for a writ of certiorari, or a writ of cert, asking the supreme court to review their case and telling them why they think it deserves review. The court gets nearly 10,000 of these petitions
a year and only accepts about 100 of them. What are some of the reasons that a justice
might want to review a case? Sometimes it’s because they think the decision
of a lower court—or the way they applied the law—is something that could impact the
entire country, so they want to consider it carefully, think about all of the intended and
unintended effects that application could have, and try to get it absolutely right. Other times they’ll review a case because
the appellate courts in different regions of the country have been deciding on similar
cases in different ways—so the Supreme Court needs to step in and decide how to apply the
federal law in the same way across the entire country. But no matter why the Supreme Court takes
up the case, it’s a big deal. By the time a case gets to them, it’s
already touched tons of smart people in the court system, who have spent a lot of time
thinking about the case, and the laws it deals with, and what those laws should mean today. And once those judges decide, the way they
interpret those laws affects what they will mean in the future. Who are those judges, by the way? And how did they get there? We’re going to talk about all the people
who decide who can become a judge, which is important because—you’re probably one of them. Stay tuned to learn exactly how the court
system affects you, and how you can affect the court system. [♪OUTRO]
