2.1 JURISDICTION INCOURTS OFLASTRESORT
A “court of last resort” is the highest court in a particular legal system. It is the last court to which litigants can resort when seeking resolution of a legal issue. In the federal system, the United States Supreme Court is the court of last resort, and the majority of its cases come from the United States Courts of Appeals of the various circuits.
In state systems, the highest court of appeals — often called the Supreme Court — is the court of last resort, and it generally hears cases from that state’s intermediate appellate courts. The United States Supreme Court can also hear appeals from state courts of last resort, but only if the issue is a matter of federal law. For example, the Court may hear an appeal in order to determine whether a state court has interpreted a law in a way that may have conflicted with the United States Constitution.Most courts of last resort are not merely courts of error; that is, they do not take cases simply because one party claims that there was an error of law in a lower court decision. For example, Rule 10 of the Rules of the Supreme Court of the United States explicitly says that “[a] petition for a writ of certiorari [the main method for gaining access to the Court] is rarely granted when the asserted error consists of erroneous factual findings or the misapplication of a properly stated rule of law.” Instead, a court of last resort takes cases in order to resolve pressing issues, and it may refuse to take cases unless or until it believes that its intervention is necessary.3Rule 10, for example, also mentions factors that make it more likely that the United States Supreme Court will grant a petition for a writ of certiorari. It notes that the Court frequently grants certiorari if it believes that a state court or a lower federal court of appeals is misinterpreting or misapplying the Court’s jurisprudence, and that the Court may be more likely to grant certiorari when two or more courts are in conflict over an interpretation of the federal Constitution, or when courts are in conflict over a question of federal law.4
Interestingly, the Court does not always grant certiorari immediately when either of these factors is present.
It is not uncommon for the Court to let a conflict simmer for a few years, with different lower courts writing decisions either way. The Court may use this method purposefully, to benefit from the analysis and reasoning of several different lower courts. By allowing several opinions to be written on a subject, the Court can assess the potential and actual impact of several different resolutions and analyses of the same issue.Perhaps for these reasons, the Court attaches no precedential value to the denial of a petition for a writ of certiorari. That is, a denial of certiorari does not indicate that the Court approves of the decision below. Rather, it means only that the Court did not believe, for whatever reason, that it was an issue that was worthy of its review at that time.