Supreme Court

The U.S. Supreme Court conducts appellate review hearings of lower-court decisions, relying on written briefs and oral arguments by counsel for the parties to help the justices formulate opinions as to cases' outcomes. The number of petitions from parties seeking to have the Supreme Court grant a hearing on their appeal far exceeds the number of cases the justices are able (or willing) to take on. For the very few cases that reach the Supreme Court, there is a highly structured, formalized process waiting. Should a petitioner succeed in obtaining a hearing, his or her attorneys will be able to submit written briefs and participate in oral arguments. Thereafter, the case will fall entirely within the justices' domain; processing of the case will include an initial justices-only conference, the exchange of draft opinions, and various types of interim decisions by the justices (e.g., on the standard of proof to which the government—if a party to the case—should be held), leading up to a majority's ultimate decision to affirm or overturn the lower-court ruling.

Matters before the Court sometimes involve questions about human behavior. The need for behavioral science knowledge provides opportunities for professional organizations to submit their own briefs addressing relevant research areas. Guidelines and precedents exist for how justices may decide cases, but such parameters are often open to disagreement and justices may even fashion new rules. The interpersonal and cognitive aspects of the justices' own decision making have also been studied. This entry examines the operations of the U.S. Supreme Court, the criteria used by justices in making decisions, the types of rulings issued by the Court, and the role of precedent in Court deliberations, as well as the various interfaces between it and psychological science.

These and other decisions by Justice Marshall reveal constitutional interpretation to be a complex enterprise, laden with ideological influences and nowhere near the detached, objective, nature that is attributed to the law. Marshall interpreted the Constitution to protect property rights and market stability, though nothing in that document, strictly speaking, mandated that interpretation. Jefferson and others criticized him on this score, but Marshall's remarkable intuition about the trajectory of American economic development ensured that the Court's particular constitutional jurisprudence would take hold. In a very real sense, Marshall's constitutionalism expressed the spirit of John Locke, whose work is the philosophical bedrock of American capitalism, breathing life into our constitutional jurisprudence. It was Locke, after all, who argued most forcefully that private property existed under natural law before the creation of political authority. From this, the eighteenth century Whigs stressed property rights as a bulwark of freedom against arbitrary, and hence oppressive, governmental authority. Marshall, with the endorsement of many of the Constitution's framers, simply took this Lockean view a step further. He believed that protecting property and sanctifying the right to contract helped in the development of investment capital and promoted the emergence of a strong national economy. Thus, Marshall's economic view, which was inspired by Locke's philosophical theorizing, became imprinted in constitutional ...