Supreme Court justices are the nine judges who sit on the highest court in the United States, and what they do, in short, is decide what federal law and the Constitution mean. That work has several moving parts: picking which cases to hear out of thousands of petitions, questioning lawyers at oral argument, voting in private conference, writing the opinions that bind every lower court, and handling emergency requests that can arrive at any hour. Their rulings are final. Only a later Supreme Court decision or a constitutional amendment can undo them.
Deciding What the Constitution and Laws Mean
The most consequential thing a justice does is judicial review: deciding whether a law, executive order, or agency regulation squares with the Constitution. The Constitution does not spell out this power in those words. It comes from the 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison, and it has defined the Court’s role ever since.1Constitution Annotated. Historical Background on Judicial Review
When the Court interprets a constitutional provision, that interpretation becomes binding precedent nationwide. A single ruling on free speech, voting rights, or police searches can change the law for every state and every court in the country on the day it is announced.
Article III of the Constitution shields justices from political pressure. They serve “during good Behaviour,” which in practice means for life, and their salaries cannot be reduced while they hold office.2Constitution Annotated. Article III Judicial Branch Removal requires impeachment. The design is deliberate: the job is to rule on what the law requires, not on what is popular.
Choosing Which Cases to Hear
Most of the Court’s workload arrives as petitions for a writ of certiorari, asking the justices to review a lower court decision. More than 8,000 of these petitions come in during a typical year. Fewer than 100 are accepted for full briefing and argument. The rest are denied, usually with no explanation, leaving the lower court ruling in place.
Law clerks do the first pass through an arrangement called the cert pool. Clerks for the participating justices divide incoming petitions, write short memos summarizing each case, and recommend whether it deserves attention. The memos circulate to every justice in the pool.3United States Courts. Supreme Court Procedures Justices who do not join the pool have their own clerks review every petition independently.
A case advances only if at least four of the nine justices vote to hear it. This is the Rule of Four.3United States Courts. Supreme Court Procedures No case is mandatory. In practice, the justices tend to pick disputes that split the federal appeals courts, raise questions of national importance, or involve unsettled constitutional law.
Petitioners who cannot afford the printing and filing costs can file in forma pauperis, which waives the docket fee and relaxes the formatting rules. The Court can also appoint counsel for a petitioner in a case accepted for argument.4Legal Information Institute. Rule 39 Proceedings In Forma Pauperis
A small category of cases skips the appeals pipeline entirely. The Supreme Court has original jurisdiction over disputes between two or more states, and that jurisdiction is exclusive — no other court can hear them. It also has original jurisdiction, shared with lower courts, over cases involving foreign ambassadors, disputes between the United States and a state, and cases a state brings against citizens of another state.5Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 28 USC 1251 – Original Jurisdiction Water rights fights between neighboring states are a typical example. These cases are rare, perhaps one or two a term.
Hearing Oral Arguments
Once a case is granted, the parties brief it in writing and then appear before the Court for oral argument. Each side gets about 30 minutes.6Supreme Court of the United States. The Court and Its Procedures On paper, that time belongs to the attorney. In practice, justices interrupt constantly with pointed questions and hypotheticals meant to probe the limits of each side’s legal theory. A lawyer who shows up ready to deliver a prepared speech will spend most of the half hour answering questions instead.
These sessions are not about new evidence. The factual record was built at trial. Oral argument is about legal interpretation: what a statute means, whether a prior case controls, how a rule would apply in other situations. Justices also use their questions to signal concerns to each other. If several justices keep pressing the same weak point, the rest of the bench notices.
Preparation is heavy. Before argument, each justice’s clerks produce bench memos analyzing both sides, flagging weaknesses in the briefing, and recommending an outcome. These memos run from a few pages for a narrow question to as many as 50 pages for a complex case. By the time a justice takes the bench, they have already read hundreds of pages of material.
Voting in Conference
After oral arguments, the justices meet in a private conference to discuss and vote. No one else is in the room. No clerks, no staff, no security. The Chief Justice opens each case by summarizing it and stating a position, and the other justices follow in order of seniority, from longest-serving to newest.3United States Courts. Supreme Court Procedures
The seniority order shapes the discussion. By the time the junior justice speaks, the rough outline of the majority and the dissent is usually visible. The most junior justice also serves as the conference doorkeeper, handling knocks and bringing in anything the group needs.
Conference votes are preliminary. A justice can switch sides later, and the drafting process does sometimes change minds. But the conference vote establishes the initial alignment, and it determines who assigns the majority opinion.
Writing the Opinions
If the Chief Justice is in the majority, the Chief Justice assigns the opinion. If not, the most senior justice in the majority makes the assignment. This power matters, because the choice of author can hold a fragile five-vote coalition together or narrow a ruling to pick up extra votes.
The assigned justice writes a draft, which circulates to all nine chambers. Other justices in the majority can request changes, push for different reasoning, or threaten to break off into a concurrence if the opinion goes too far. A concurring opinion agrees with the result but offers different reasoning. A dissenting opinion disagrees with the result entirely. A single case can produce a majority opinion, two concurrences, and a dissent, all negotiated over weeks or months of back-and-forth.
That drafting process is often contentious. Justices redraft to address a colleague’s concerns, narrow a holding to keep five votes, or sharpen language in response to a dissent. The final text has to be precise, because lower courts, agencies, and litigants will parse every sentence.
Dissents have no legal force the day they are issued, but they can matter later. Justice Harlan’s solo dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, arguing that the Constitution “neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” was cited by Thurgood Marshall in Brown v. Board of Education, the decision that overturned Plessy. Dissents sometimes push Congress to change a statute or lay groundwork for a future Court to reverse direction.
Opinions are announced from the bench in public sessions that begin at 10 a.m. The author typically reads a summary aloud. Dissenting justices occasionally read portions of their dissents from the bench, which is understood as a signal that they feel strongly the majority got it wrong.
Handling Emergency Applications
Each justice is assigned to one or more federal judicial circuits and serves as the Circuit Justice for that region.7Supreme Court of the United States. Circuit Assignments The most visible part of this role is handling emergency applications: requests for immediate action that cannot wait for the Court’s regular schedule. Last-minute stays of execution, emergency injunctions against new regulations, and applications to pause a lower court order all come through this channel.
A single Circuit Justice can grant or deny a temporary stay, or refer the matter to the full Court. In weighing emergency relief, the justice considers whether four justices would likely vote to hear the case, whether the applicant has a reasonable chance of winning on the merits, and whether denying relief would cause irreparable harm.
These rulings have drawn attention under the informal label “shadow docket.” Unlike the Court’s merits decisions, which follow months of briefing, public argument, and signed opinions, emergency orders are often decided within days, without full briefing, and sometimes without any written reasoning. Critics argue this allows consequential rulings without the transparency of the regular process. Defenders say emergencies require speed and that the orders are temporary.
Justices stay available for emergency filings year-round, including during the summer recess. A stay application can arrive hours before a scheduled execution, and the Circuit Justice has to act, sometimes in the middle of the night.
How Justices Get the Job and Keep It
Justices are nominated by the President and confirmed by a majority vote in the Senate.8United States Courts. Nomination Process The Constitution sets no formal qualifications. No minimum age, no law degree, no citizenship requirement, no prior judicial experience.9Supreme Court of the United States. Frequently Asked Questions – General Information Every modern justice has been a lawyer, and most served on a federal appeals court before nomination, but neither is legally required.
The number nine is not in the Constitution either. Congress sets the size of the Court by statute, and nine has been the number since 1869.10Supreme Court of the United States. The Court as an Institution Six justices are needed as a quorum to decide a case.9Supreme Court of the United States. Frequently Asked Questions – General Information Justices serve until they die, retire, or are removed by impeachment.
For most of its history, the Court operated without a formal ethics code. In November 2023, the Court adopted its first written code of conduct. The code requires justices to step aside from cases where their impartiality could reasonably be questioned, including situations involving financial interests, prior professional relationships with a party, or family connections to lawyers or litigants.11Supreme Court of the United States. Code of Conduct for Justices In early 2026, the Court added automated software that checks party and attorney information against each justice’s personal conflict records, and updated its filing rules to require comprehensive lists of litigants and stock ticker symbols so the system can flag conflicts before a justice sees the case.