374 CHAPTER 12|THE COURTS
The Court’s Criteria
How does the Court decide which cases to hear? Several factors come into play,
including the specifi c characteristics of the case and the broader politics surround-
ing it. Although several criteria generally must be met before the Court will hear
the case, justices still have leeway in defi ning the boundaries of these conditions.COLLUSION, STANDING, MOOTNESS, AND RIPENESS
First, there are the constitutional guidelines, which are sparse. The Constitu-
tion limits the Court to hearing actual “cases and controversies,” which has been
interpreted to mean that the Court cannot off er advisory opinions about hypo-
thetical situations but must deal with actual cases. The term “actual controversy”
also includes several other concepts that limit whether a case will be heard: collu-
sion, standing, mootness, and ripeness. Collusion simply means that the litigants
in the case cannot want the same outcome and cannot be testing the law without
an actual dispute occurring between the two parties.^25
Standing is the most general criterion; as noted above, it 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 the justices think
are important even when the plaintiff may not have standing, as traditionally
understood, or it may duck cases that may be politically sensitive on the grounds
that there is no standing. For example, the Court has decided several important
racial redistricting cases even when the white plaintiffs had not suffered any
personal harm by being in the black-majority districts.^26 On the other hand,
in a politically sensitive case involving the pledge of allegiance and the First
Amendment, the Court decided not to hear the case, saying the father of the stu-
dent who brought the case did not have standing because he did not have suf-
ficient custody over his daughter (he was divorced and the mother had primary
custody).^27 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 ducked the
former case by saying the plaintiffs did not have standing and ruled on the mer-
its of the latter case.
Mootness means that the controversy must still be relevant when the Court
hears the case. For example, a student sued a law school for reverse discrimina-
tion, saying that he had not been admitted because of the university’s affi rmative
action policy. A lower court agreed and ordered that the student be admitted. The
appeals court reversed the decision, but the student was allowed to remain enrolled
while the case was appealed to the Supreme Court. By the time the Supreme Court
received the case, the student was in his last semester of law school and the uni-
versity said that he would graduate no matter the outcome of the case. Therefore,
the Court refused to hear the case because it was moot.^28 However, there have to be
exceptions to this principle because some types of cases would always be moot by
the time they reach the Supreme Court. For example, exceptions have been made for
abortion cases because a pregnancy lasts only nine months and the time that it takes
to get a case from district court, to the appeals court, to the Supreme Court always
takes longer than that.
Ripeness can be considered the opposite of mootness. With mootness the con-
troversy is already over; with ripeness the controversy has not started yet. Just
as you wouldn’t want to eat a piece of fruit before it is ripe, the Court doesn’t want
to hear a case until it is ripe. Sometimes ripeness can aff ect standing. One exam-mootness The irrelevance of a
case by the time it is received by a
federal court, causing the court to
decline to hear the case.
ripeness A criterion that federal
courts use to decide whether a case
is ready to be heard. A case’s ripe-
ness is based on whether its central
issue or controversy has actually
taken place.