Legal Question in Appeals and Writs in California

Re: Who

The central staff of the Court reviews new petitions for review. nd if a petition survives this screening process, it goes to the Court for a vote - four votes are needed to grant.

Re: Who

Your question doesn't specify whether you mean the Supreme Court of the United States or of California Supreme Court, so I will presume you mean the U.S. Supreme Court.

Copies of each petition are given to each of the nine justices. Each justice has four or five law clerks -- recent law school graduates chosen through a very competitive process -- and the clerks from eight of the nine chambers work together in a pool to evaluate each petition and make recommendations to the Court about which cases to accept. (Justice Scalia has chosen not to participate in this system; his clerks separately evaluate each case and give their evaluations directly to him). The evaluations include summaries of the facts of the case and of its history in the courts, along with discussions of the legal issues involved and of the various factors the Court uses when deciding which cases to take.

The vast majority of petitions to the Court do not really qualify for review and get routine write-ups. Such cases include those in which the dispute is about facts rather than law (the Supreme Court only concerns itself with questions about the law) or where the legal issue involved is not seriously debatable. The Court generally will also decline cases which were decided on the basis of state law. Other petitions are rejected because of substantial procedural mistakes.

After reviewing the clerks' evaluations separately, all nine of the justices meet in a conference and vote on which cases to accept. Four votes out of the nine are needed in order to grant review.

Note that the Court generally does *not* select cases based upon whether the result below was correct. The Supreme Court's job is to authoritatively explain what the Constitution and federal laws mean, and not to correct errors made by lower courts. If a petitioner lost because the lower courts misunderstood well-settled law, the Supreme Court is very unlikely to take the case. Where a case presents an important question which has not been answered authoritatively, the Court will likely accept it regardless of whether the lower court's decision seems right or wrong.