History and Workings of The U.S. Supreme Court

The United States Supreme Court has always been known as the "highest judicial court in a country or state", and even when learned at a young age you are taught to value and respect the highest court in the land. This isn't just preached by historians and politicians, but by the American people and this is because the Supreme Court decides legal cases that directly affect the American people by interpreting the 200 year old document, The U.S. Constitution.

Politicians are frequently arguing about the constitution, but within the Supreme Court, politics is put aside. After watching these two videos discussing the Supreme Court, it showed me the respect and honor each Supreme Court Justice had for one another, because at the end of the day they all knew that their views came out of logical reasoning and most importantly "good faith", and not political tendencies. Listening to Former Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O'Connor, talk about her first day entering the conference room showed me that these positions of power are not only valued by the American People, but even by the Justices themselves. They understood the power of their role and most importantly they didn't let it affect them. The Justices talked about how they worked in collaboration with one another and that allowing everyone to speak just once was really important, because it gave everyone equal time to state their views/opinions. The types of strategies they used to work in collaboration with each other are really thought out and is shown to be imperative, even the small things like being sure to shake each others hands before taking the bench/working in conference. These types of strategies represent the value that they all hold to this position.

Behind the Scenes of Sandra Day O'Connor's First Days on the Supreme Court
One new thing that I learned about the U.S. Supreme Court is Opinion Writing. I was unaware that once a case has been decided, there must be an opinion piece backing up their decisions to go with it and I found this very interesting. One member of the majority writes it and if there is a justice who disagrees has the right to write their own dissenting from the decision. I found this to only be interesting, but imperative to have in our Judicial System, because it allows future judges to go back and review past reasonings for their decision on specific cases which can help judges decide IF the case is similar by principal.