Blog Post #2

 The Supreme Court Reflection

    I had always had a respect for the Supreme Court implemented into me, but not so much a deep understanding of how intricate the court is. The videos, part 1 and 2, really opened my knowledge of how the court functions. For example, I knew the Supreme Court was powerful, but I didn’t know it was the “most powerful Judicial body on Earth.” The nine justices have an extremely difficult job to solve some of the countries most pressing issues, on the determination of interpreting a 200 year old Constitution. In those 200 plus years, our country has only seen just over 100 justices. These justices all sign up to serve the rest of their lifetime, which is an average of 16 years, but many have had the privilege of their time being double the average. 

    Something that surprised me in the video, was that the courts were not always in Washington. They moved there in 1801.

    I learned that the Dred Scott case is known as the courts “great self inflicted wound” that affected their credibility and authority for years. This was solved by the Civil War. I also learned that the 14th amendment is sometimes referred to as “the second Bill of Rights.”

    I wasn’t aware that the court receives about 7,000 cases a year, and each of the like are treated with the same consideration, no matter who wrote it. I also found out that in the event that a petition goes to the Supreme Court, each side has an uninterrupted 30 mins to present their side of the case in a public court. 

    In general, the first draft of the courts opinion takes an average of four weeks. In this, their most time consuming job for the justices is opinion writing. The most important takeaway from these videos is that if the court every lost credibility or stopped upholding the Constitution, our countries freedom would not work the way it so beautifully it does today.