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Comment by toomanyrichies | Hacker News Reader

For those who were curious about the legal term "certiorari" (as I was):

> "Certiorari is generally associated with the writ that the Supreme Court of the United States issues to review a lower court's judgment. A case cannot, as a matter of right, be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. As such, a party seeking to appeal to the Supreme Court from a lower court decision must file a writ of certiorari.

> In the Supreme Court, if four Justices agree to review the case, then the Court will hear the case. This is referred to as "granting certiorari," often abbreviated as "cert." If four Justices do not agree to review the case, the Court will not hear the case. This is defined as denying certiorari."

1. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/certiorari#:~:text=In%20the%....

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My sister tells a tale of a groan-inducing joke wherein folks at law school would offer a mint, and then, at the last minute, snap their hand closed and say "CERT DENIED."

Sounds like that could also work as a TLS joke.

I dont get it what does a mint have to do with a cert?

"Certs" is a brand of breath mint.[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certs

"Let that sink in..."

I thought, when I remembered the joke, that i hadn't seen them for a while -- but I was still surprised to see, on the wiki page, that they've been off the market since 2018.

Oh dear. Thats the worst lawyer joke I’ve heard and I’ve been at this for a spell.

I loved all the Latin when I was lawyer-adjacent. Even if it's, inter alia, pointless.

Hey, engineers can say "<foo> considered harmful" and laugh about it. It's an inside joke. Every profession has them.

Is this not widely known among Americans? I’m Swedish and think of this as common knowledge…

> I’m Swedish and think of this as common knowledge…

I am Canadian and it's the first time I have heard this term. I am surprised you know about this from Sweden. I knew of the Canadian term, "leave" or "leave to appeal" though.

The US Supreme Court gets a lot of attention in Sweden. In this particular case I looked it up in 2018 when I did a bet with a friend that SCOTUS would not overturn Roe vs Wade within four years. I lost that bet, by about a month.

The Swedish just seem super up to date on Americans in general. Every one I meet apologizes for their English and then proceeds to speak immaculate English.

I think the process is mostly known, but the word "certiorari" is not.

I think the process is widely known - but I didn't know it had a random Latin name until today. Another good reason not to add jargon for easy to understand things that are better explained in three words.

> Another good reason not to add jargon

The use of “certiorari” for legal review is literally older than English, so complaining about its continued use as adding jargon is misplaced.

It's sort of the other way around. The process changed changed but the name stuck. The history is quite more complicated, if you're interested you can look at a summary here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/reason.com/volokh/2022/05/10/a-...

Is it always 4 justices, or does it scale with the size of the court?

The Supreme Court basically makes their own operating rules. They could set different criteria for granting certiorari if they wanted to, regardless of the number of justices.

The size of SCOTUS has not changed since 1869. Note that's "18" not "19."

US civics education is horrendous. Only 30% of US students are proficient in civics standards. About half of US adults sampled couldn't even name the three branches of government; an elected US Senator said "Our government wasn’t set up for one group to have all three branches of government. … You know, the House, the Senate and the executive". A huge majority wildly misunderstand the first amendment [1].

I used to volunteer with a civics ed non-profit. Students, almost all whom had already completed their required civics curriculum, entered our program with all sorts of wildly insane misunderstandings of American governance.

[1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:g4DAnD...

> an elected US Senator said "Our government wasn’t set up for one group to have all three branches of government. … You know, the House, the Senate and the executive".

I should stop having impostor syndrome.

>all three +political+ branches of government. … You know, the House, the Senate and the executive

Would this be more accurate? I'm not sure the judicial branch is considered political enough for "one group" to "have".

It's not how the term "branch" is commonly used. You could say it, and people would know what you meant... but then, people understood what the Senator meant in the first place.

For that matter... the Judicial branch is quite political, and is widely considered to be "had" by one particular political party. 2/3 of its members were nominated by that party, and nominations have been increasingly subjected to ideological litmus tests. (Which they must then pretend not to have until confirmed.)

> US civics education is horrendous. Only 30% of US students are proficient in civics standards

And 100% of them repeat the tired cliche of name-dropping "Founding Fathers" in every reddit thread.

Now imagine how the minds are blown when they learn that the US legislators haven’t actually legislated, which is to say actually written a bill, in living memory.

The actual process by which laws are passed resembles the schoolhouse rock version about as much as Roger Rabbit resembles criminal proceedings.

Of course, the mentioned Senator from Alabama wasn’t elected because he was competent. Alabama appears to have different priorities.

> all three branches of government. … You know, the House, the Senate and the executive

While it's objectively the case that this is not accurate, control of those three is commonly called a "trifecta" by pundits and political operatives, so that's probably the source of the confusion.

No, I don't think so. "Trifecta" is a fairly recent term for that.

Knowing that the judiciary is set up to be independent is pretty critical.

Define "recent"? This 2007 article uses the term: https://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/2664-wall-street-rea...

My point is that this could easily be a slip of the tongue, the kind of mistake that I could see myself making when speaking extemporaneously. But making that mistake would not mean that I didn't understand the difference between the three branches of government and the three distinct "federal electoral prizes", so to speak.

Knowing that we're talking about Tommy Tuberville, I'm obviously less inclined to offer him the benefit of the doubt, but we are still jumping to conclusions.

2007 is definitely "recent" when we're talking about the Constitution.

I think you'd find that shocking percentages of Americans don't understand any basic information. Probably not even who's the Vice President, or who's next in line of succession after the VP.

Heck, even much of the press in the US is confused about it. It is quite common for cert. denied to be reported as the Court affirming the lower court's decision that is being appealed.

All cert. denied means is that the Court decided not to hear the case. That may be because they agree with the lower court, but that is just one reason they might decide not to hear the case.

Another reason they might decide cert. is that although they think the case raises issues that they need to deal with, the particular circumstances of this particular case don't present the issue as clearly as they would like. They want to wait until a better case comes along with the issue.

Sometimes they want to wait until appeals courts in different regions have considered the issue and explored different approaches to it so more of the possible arguments on both sides have been hashed out.

It is not.

Source: Am American. The average joe here doesn't know very much about how the appellate legal system works, or the terms at use.

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