The History of the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court is overwhelmed. It has like 1,800 pending cases on its docket. Congress introduced first very gradually and then much more aggressively what we now call certiorari. And this starts as an experiment in 1891 in four really small classes of cases that nobody cares about. Then the breaks come completely off in 1988, where today, the Supreme Court's appellate docket is almost entirely discretionary.