Supreme Courts

Abstract

This article summarizes multiple features of supreme courts in common-law and civil-law countries: their characteristics, decision-making processes and dynamics, and relations to other governmental institutions and important organized interests and parties in society. The survey is limited to courts of final appeal that take cases from lower courts within national judicial systems (thus, constitutional courts that take cases only on referral from other governmental branches are not included in this definition). Particular, but not exclusive, attention is devoted to the growing policy-making role of many supreme courts in recent decades, to significant limitations on judicial power, and to mechanisms used by governments in many countries to compel their supreme courts to defer to governmental policies.