508 Chapter 14Chapter 14 || The CourtsThe Courtsis called, reasonably enough, the Rule of Four). This process may sound simple, but
sifting through the 7,000 or so cases that the Court receives every year and deciding
which 75 of them will be heard is daunting. Former justice William O. Douglas said that
this winnowing process is “in many respects the most important and interesting of all
our functions.”^37The Court’s Criteria
How does the Court decide which cases to hear? Several factors come into play,
including the specific characteristics of the case and the broader politics surrounding
it. Although several criteria generally must be met before the Court will hear the case,
justices still have leeway in defining the boundaries of these conditions.Collusion, Standing, and Mootness First, there are the constitutional guidelines,
which are sparse. The Constitution limits the Court to hearing actual “cases and
controversies,” which has been interpreted to mean that the Court cannot offer
advisory opinions about hypothetical situations but must deal with actual cases. The
term “actual controversy” also includes several other concepts that limit whether a
case will be heard: collusion, standing, and mootness. Collusion simply means that
the litigants in the case cannot want the same outcome and cannot be testing the law
without an actual dispute between the two parties.^38
Standing, as we noted earlier, means that the party bringing the case must have a
personal stake in the outcome. The Court has discretion in defining standing: it may
hear cases that it thinks are important even when the plaintiff may not have standing
as traditionally understood, or it may avoid hearing cases that may be politically
sensitive on the grounds that there is no standing. In an example of the former, the
Court decided several important racial redistricting cases even when the white
plaintiffs had not suffered any personal harm by being in the black-majority districts.^39
In an example of the latter, the Court decided not to hear a politically sensitive case
involving the Pledge of Allegiance and the First Amendment, saying that the father
of the student who brought the case did not have standing because he did not have
sufficient custody over his daughter (he was divorced and the mother had primary
custody).^40 Clearly, the Court was more eager to voice its views on redistricting than on
the Pledge of Allegiance, because it could have just as easily avoided hearing the former
case by saying the plaintiffs did not have standing and taken up the latter case despite
the concern over custody (it was his daughter after all, which should have given him
some stake!). This is an important point to consider: the Court often avoids hearing a
controversial case based on a “threshold” issue like standing and then does not have
to decide on the merits of the case.
A controversy must still be relevant when the Court hears the case; mootness occurs
when a case is irrelevant by the time it is brought before a federal court. Nonetheless,
there are exceptions to this principle, because some types of cases are necessarily moot
by the time they get to the Supreme Court. For example, exceptions have been made for
abortion cases because a pregnancy lasts only nine months, and it always takes longer
than that for a case to get from district court to the appeals court to the Supreme Court.
Thousands of cases every year meet these basic criteria. One very simple guideline
eliminates the largest number of cases: if a case does not involve a “substantial federal
question,” it will not be heard. This essentially means that the Court does not have to
hear a case if the justices do not think it is important enough. Of course, the “federal”
part of this standard is also important: if a case is governed by state law rather than
federal law, the Court will decline to hear the case unless there are constitutionalmootness
The irrelevance of a case by the time it
is received by a federal court, causing
the Supreme Court to decline to hear
the case.Full_15_APT_64431_ch14_488-529.indd 508 16/11/18 1:45 PM