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In the federal system, courts may only decide actual cases or controversies; it is not possible to request the federal courts to review a law without at least one party having legal standing to engage in a lawsuit. This principle means that courts sometimes do not exercise their power of review, even when a law is seemingly unconstitutional ...
First, the Court has held that the clause identifies the scope of matters which a federal court can and cannot consider as a case (i.e., it distinguishes between lawsuits within and beyond the institutional competence of the federal judiciary), and limits federal judicial power only to such lawsuits as the court is competent to hear.
Omega S.A. v. Costco Wholesale Corp. is an example of such a case. The court tries to avoid tied votes when possible. When a new justice is appointed, ordinarily only the other eight justices will decide any case that has already had oral arguments. But when the participating justices are evenly split, the case may be reargued with the new justice.
The Supreme Court is the only federal court that is explicitly established by the Constitution. During the Constitutional Convention, a proposal was made for the Supreme Court to be the only federal court, having both original jurisdiction and appellate jurisdiction. This proposal was rejected in favor of the provision that exists today.
It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that turn on questions of U.S. constitutional or federal law. It also has original jurisdiction over a narrow range of cases, specifically "all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be ...
In that case, the decision of the court may be ultra vires, and may sometimes be characterized as judicial activism. In 1824, US Chief Justice John Marshall wrote the following on this subject: Judicial power, as contradistinguished from the power of the laws, has no existence. Courts are the mere instruments of the law, and can will nothing.
The court noted in a footnote in the decision that under 28 U.S.C. § 1872: "In all original actions at law in the Supreme Court against citizens of the United States, issues of fact shall be tried by a jury." [15] However, it did not decide whether the statute and the Seventh Amendment required such a jury. [15]
In difficult cases, the federal courts must either guess as to how a court of that state would decide the issue or, if that state accepts certified questions from federal courts when state law is unclear or uncertain, ask an appellate court of that state to decide the issue. [citation needed]