The U.S. Supreme Court decides cases through a months-long sequence that starts with a private vote on whether to even hear a case, moves through written briefs and a tightly timed oral argument, and ends with a closed-door conference and a circulated opinion that has to win over a majority of the nine justices before it’s released — and fewer than 2 percent of the cases that ask for that process ever get it.

Getting In the Door: Certiorari

The Court doesn’t have to hear any case that comes its way; with rare exceptions, it chooses. A party that lost in a lower court can file a petition for a writ of certiorari, asking the Court to review the case. The Court receives thousands of these petitions every year and grants only around 100 to 150 of them. Under what’s known as the “rule of four,” it takes just four of the nine justices — not a majority — to agree to hear a case, according to the U.S. Courts website. Law clerks screen the flood of incoming petitions and write memos recommending which are worth the justices’ time, and the Court tends to prioritize cases involving major constitutional questions or ones where lower courts have reached conflicting conclusions on the same legal issue.

Briefs, Then an Hour in the Room

Once a case is accepted, both sides file written legal briefs laying out their arguments, and outside groups often submit “friend of the court” briefs to weigh in with additional perspective — high-profile cases can draw well over a hundred of these. Then comes oral argument, where each side typically gets 30 minutes, though in practice most of that time goes to fielding rapid-fire questions from the justices rather than delivering a prepared speech. The Court hears arguments from October through April, usually two cases a day, which is why even an accepted case doesn’t move quickly through the system.

The Private Vote

Days after oral argument, the justices meet alone in a closed conference — no clerks, no staff, just the nine of them. The Chief Justice speaks first about the case, then each justice weighs in in order of seniority, from most to least senior, and voting follows that same order. A simple majority of the nine justices decides the final outcome. This conference is one of the most closely guarded traditions in government: there are no recordings and no transcripts, nothing beyond what the justices themselves later choose to reveal.

Writing the Opinion

Once the vote is settled, someone has to write it up. If the Chief Justice voted with the majority, the Chief Justice assigns who drafts the majority opinion; otherwise that job falls to the most senior justice in the majority. The assigned justice writes a draft and circulates it to the others, and this is where a case can still shift — justices negotiate over the language, and one can even change sides based on how a draft reads. A majority of the Court must formally sign on to the opinion’s content before it’s released. Justices who disagree with the outcome can write dissents, and those who agree with the outcome but not the reasoning can write concurrences; both become part of the public record alongside the majority opinion.

Why the Timeline Stretches So Long

From petition to published opinion, a single case can take the better part of a year or longer. Oral arguments run October through April, but many of the most significant opinions aren’t released until June, at the very end of the Court’s term — the result of months spent drafting, circulating, and negotiating language that will serve as binding precedent for lower courts nationwide. That deliberate pace, unlike almost anything else in American government, is built into how the Court operates by design, and it’s the reason a ruling on a case argued in the fall often doesn’t arrive until the following summer.