How Long Has the Supreme Court Been Around? Justices and Rulings

The U.S. Supreme Court has been around for more than 236 years. President George Washington signed the Judiciary Act of 1789 on September 24 of that year, and the Court first assembled on February 1, 1790, in New York City. ¹ It is the only court the Constitution itself creates, and it has operated without interruption ever since, which makes it one of the oldest functioning supreme courts in the world.

When the Court Actually Started Working

Article III, Section 1 of the Constitution vests “the judicial Power of the United States” in “one supreme Court” and whatever lower courts Congress chooses to create. ² The framers wrote that article sparely. Compared with the sections on Congress and the presidency, Article III was, as the National Archives puts it, “markedly smaller,” leaving the First Congress to work out how a federal judiciary would actually run. ³

Congress did that with the Judiciary Act of 1789, which established the Supreme Court with one chief justice and five associate justices, divided the country into thirteen judicial districts, and set up district and circuit courts beneath it. ¹ Lawmakers deliberately gave federal courts a narrower jurisdiction than the Constitution would have allowed, judging that the public was not yet ready for a full federal court system. ³

Chief Justice John Jay called the Court to assemble on February 1, 1790, at the Merchants Exchange Building in New York City, then the nation’s capital. Travel delays pushed the real start to February 2, when Justices William Cushing and John Blair were sworn in. ⁴ Those first sessions were mostly organizational. The Court did not decide its first case, West v. Barnes, until August 3, 1791, when a unanimous bench handed down a procedural ruling about a farm mortgage. ⁵

The early docket was thin. Justices met for just a few weeks each February and August and spent most of their time “riding circuit,” traveling long distances to preside over trial courts with local federal judges. ⁶ The job was unattractive enough that Chief Justice Jay resigned in 1795 to become governor of New York, then declined later reappointment. ⁷

John Marshall and the Court’s Rise to Power

The Court existed from 1790, but it became a co-equal branch of government under John Marshall, chief justice from 1801 until his death in 1835. His 34-year tenure is the longest in Court history.

Marshall’s most consequential ruling was Marbury v. Madison in 1803. The case grew out of a judicial commission that outgoing President John Adams had signed but incoming Secretary of State James Madison refused to deliver. Marshall held that although William Marbury had a right to his commission, the section of the Judiciary Act of 1789 that let the Court order Madison to deliver it exceeded the Court’s constitutional jurisdiction. The Constitution, Marshall wrote, is the “fundamental and paramount law,” and “a Law repugnant to the Constitution is void.” ⁸ With that, the Court claimed judicial review: the power to strike down acts of Congress and the executive that violate the Constitution. ⁹

Marshall’s later opinions kept building. McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) upheld Congress’s implied powers under the “necessary and proper” clause and barred states from taxing federal institutions. ¹⁰ Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) read Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce broadly, striking down a New York steamboat monopoly. Cohens v. Virginia (1821) reaffirmed federal judicial authority over state court decisions involving federal law. ¹¹ After Marbury, the Court did not strike down another federal statute until Dred Scott in 1857, but the precedent held.

How the Number of Justices Has Changed Over Time

The Constitution does not set the size of the Court. Congress has, and it has changed its mind seven times:

1789: six justices.
1801: reduced to five by the Judiciary Act of 1801, then restored to six when Congress repealed that act in 1802.
1807: a seventh justice added.
1837: an eighth and ninth added.
1863: a tenth justice added with the creation of a Tenth Circuit, the Court’s largest-ever size.
1866: Congress reduced the Court to seven through attrition, though the number never actually fell below eight.
1869: the Judiciary Act of 1869, signed by President Ulysses S. Grant, set the number at nine.

The Court has had nine justices ever since. ¹²

The best-known attempt to change that number came in 1937. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, frustrated after the Court struck down several New Deal statutes, proposed the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill, which would have let him appoint an additional justice for every sitting justice over the age of 70, up to six new seats. ¹³ Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes undercut the plan with a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee arguing the Court did not need help and that adding justices would cause “inefficiency and delay.” The committee called the bill “an invasion of judicial power.” After Senate Majority Leader Joe Robinson died in July 1937, the Senate tabled the plan on July 22. ¹⁴

The episode produced the phrase “the switch in time that saved nine.” Weeks after Roosevelt announced the plan, the Court upheld a Washington State minimum wage law in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937), with Justice Owen Roberts siding with the majority after opposing a similar law the year before. Observers read it as a strategic retreat, though historians have since noted that Roberts cast his vote before the plan was even announced. ¹⁵ No president since has asked Congress to change the number of seats.

A Shift in What the Court Does

For its first century, the Court had to hear nearly every case that reached it, and by the late 1800s it was buried. The Evarts Act of 1891 created a new layer of appellate courts, the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals, in each of the nine federal circuits. Rerouting cases to those courts cut the Supreme Court’s new filings from 623 in 1890 to 275 by 1892. ¹⁶ The Evarts Act also largely ended the justices’ century-old obligation to ride circuit; the old circuit courts were formally abolished in 1911. ⁶

The second big change came with the Judges’ Bill of 1925, drafted by a committee of justices led by Justice Willis Van Devanter. It repealed most of the Court’s mandatory jurisdiction and replaced it with discretionary review through the writ of certiorari. ¹⁷ Today the Court receives thousands of cert petitions a year and agrees to hear only a small fraction. In the 1980s it decided more than 160 cases per year. During the October 2024 term it decided 56 cases with signed opinions. The emergency docket (sometimes called the “shadow docket”) has grown in the opposite direction, with 113 matters decided through that expedited process during the most recent fully reported term, compared with 44 the year before. ¹⁸

Where the Court Has Met

For a branch of government that symbolizes permanence, the Court spent its first 145 years without a building of its own. It started at the Royal Exchange in New York, followed the federal government to Philadelphia in 1791 (meeting first at Independence Hall and then Old City Hall), and moved to Washington, D.C., in 1800, where it sat in a series of rooms inside the U.S. Capitol, including the Old Supreme Court Chamber from 1810 to 1860 and the Old Senate Chamber from 1860 to 1935. It even met briefly in a private residence after the British burned the Capitol during the War of 1812. ¹⁹²⁰

Chief Justice William Howard Taft began lobbying for a dedicated building in 1912. Congress eventually authorized nearly $9.74 million for the project and hired architect Cass Gilbert, who modeled the structure on a classical Roman temple. President Herbert Hoover laid the cornerstone on October 13, 1932. Neither Taft nor Gilbert lived to see it finished. The building was completed in 1935 under Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and Gilbert’s son at a final cost of $9,395,566, about $94,000 under budget. ²⁰ The first session there was held on October 7, 1935. ¹⁹

Landmark Rulings Along the Way

Across more than two centuries, a handful of decisions have reshaped American law and life:

Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857): declared that African Americans were not U.S. citizens and that Congress could not ban slavery in federal territories. The ruling is widely regarded as one of the worst in the Court’s history and helped push the country toward the Civil War.²¹
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): upheld “separate but equal,” providing legal cover for racial segregation for nearly six decades.²¹
Brown v. Board of Education (1954): unanimously overturned Plessy, finding that “separate schools are inherently unequal” and that segregated public education violates the Fourteenth Amendment.²²
Miranda v. Arizona (1966): required police to warn suspects of their rights to silence and counsel before interrogation.²²
Roe v. Wade (1973): recognized a constitutional right to abortion under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.²¹
United States v. Nixon (1974): ruled unanimously that the president is not above the law and that executive privilege does not override the need for evidence in a criminal proceeding.²²
Obergefell v. Hodges (2015): legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in a 5–4 ruling under the Fourteenth Amendment.²¹
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022): overturned Roe v. Wade 6–3, holding that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion and returning the question to the states.²¹

The Court has reversed its own prior decisions an estimated 232 times since 1810. ²³

The Court Today

As of 2026, 116 individuals have served on the Supreme Court, including 17 chief justices. ⁷ The current bench is led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., appointed by President George W. Bush in 2005. The associate justices are Clarence Thomas (George H.W. Bush), Samuel A. Alito Jr. (George W. Bush), Sonia Sotomayor (Barack Obama), Elena Kagan (Obama), Neil M. Gorsuch (Donald Trump), Brett M. Kavanaugh (Trump), Amy Coney Barrett (Trump), and Ketanji Brown Jackson (Joseph Biden). ²⁴ The most recent retirement was Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who stepped down on June 30, 2022. From the first assembly in February 1790 to the current nine-member bench, the Court has run continuously for more than 236 years.

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2
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16
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21
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