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The Supreme Court: A User GuideThe Supreme Court matters next election. Seriously.

By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Saturday, June 21, 2008, at 9:14 AM ET
The Supreme Court

This week, the Supreme Court will hand down its final opinions for the 2007-08 term, and some of you will be really angry about guns, and some of you will be angry about Guantanamo. But then the justices will take off for Europe (or New Hampshire) and you will take off for the pool (or New Hampshire), and then I fear nobody will think much about the court again until next June.

The composition of the high court is one of the most important issues at stake in the November election. While the justices cannot bring down gas prices or bring home the troops, their decisions in the coming years will affect just about everything else: your rights regarding privacy, reproduction, speech and religion; how to count your vote and where your kids go to school; as well as your occupational and environmental protections. You name it, they'll decide it. Or they'll decide not to decide it (which may be even worse).

It's easy to convince yourself that who sits on that bench is irrelevant to you because the cases are too complicated to comprehend or too remote to affect your life. But the next president may have the chance to appoint as many as three justices—the constitutional equivalent of a royal flush. Herein, a user's guide to the Supreme Court for you to print out and take to the voting booth (or read at the pool).

The basics: The court is the highest judicial body in the country, made up of nine justices appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Justices serve for life so long as they exhibit "good behavior," which is meticulously calibrated as someplace between the possession of a heartbeat and the capacity to draw breath. The justices decide cases from October through June of each year, for which they have a total of about three dozen wee, elfin creatures called clerks to assist them. This term they will decide fewer than 70 cases—the smallest docket in modern history. A traffic judge hears that many cases on a slow day.

The job description: Since Marbury v. Madison, decided in 1803, the justices have had the power of "judicial review," which means (at least in theory) that the court can strike down any law it deems unconstitutional. This may sound somewhat elitist and undemocratic, because these unelected justices have the power to throw out a law even if it is a) popular and b) properly passed by a legislature. Why? Because sometimes duly elected legislatures pass popular but unconstitutional laws. Not everyone currently seated on the bench, though, believes in deploying this constitutional superpower. They would rather have the justices sit at the constitutional kids' table and eat mac and cheese. According to some of these more conservative jurists, judges should refrain from second-guessing the other branches of government in all matters of national security, employment discrimination, health policy, the separation of church and state, free speech, and environmental protection. Never fear. This still leaves the court front and center on critical jurisprudential questions of admiralty law and who gets to sit in the front seat when someone yells "shotgun."

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Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.
Photograph of the Supreme Court building by Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images.
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