Blog post #2: History and Workings of the U.S. Supreme Court

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 History and Workings of the U.S. Supreme Court

I learned a lot of new things about the Supreme Court that I was not aware of. I chose to read the SCOTUS History article to get my information over the videos. This was unexpectedly a very easy article to digest and I learned a lot about the Supreme Court through it. 


To begin, I discovered that the very first case that the Supreme Court ever worked on was between a farmer and a family on August 3, 1791. This precedent case was called West v. Barnes, and it included a farmer who owed money to a family (https://www.history.com/topics/us-government-and-politics/supreme-court-facts). The fact that this was the very first case that the Supreme Court ever decided was both fascinating and surprising given how straightforward the dispute in question is. It is remarkable to compare the types of cases that the court deals with now to the very first case they were ever given, as well as to compare the level of difficulty in the cases that they deal with now to the very first case they were ever given.


Source: https://mholloway63.wordpress.com/2015/01/31/what-happened-on-february-1st-first-session-of-the-u-s-supreme-court/ 


The biggest take away point of the article that I found was that originally, the Supreme Court was made up of only six justices. However, Congress changed the number of Supreme Court seats multiple times. It went from the original six seats, was then changed to five, then ten, and finally in 1869, Congress set the number of seats to nine. It has remained the same today (https://www.history.com/topics/us-government-and-politics/supreme-court-facts). This is such a small number of such powerful people controlling so much. Of course, they are voted in and are very qualified to hold these positions of power. Still, it is interesting that the number has changed that many times since the founding of the Supreme Court, and even more interesting that the number has not changed once since 1869, almost 200 years ago. 



The information that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is in charge of supervising and overseeing the impeachment hearings of the President (https://www.history.com/topics/us-government-and-politics/supreme-court-facts) was the piece of this article that surprised me the most. I was aware of this fact; however, it is obvious that I require a deeper understanding of the workings of the systems that make up our country because I believed that Congress would be responsible for overseeing the impeachment process. When I was reading this article about the Supreme Court, this particular point stood out to me as the most interesting and important takeaway I got.

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