Original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of the United States
Based on Wikipedia: Original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of the United States
The Rarest Door Into America's Highest Court
In 1906, a mob in Chattanooga, Tennessee lynched a Black man named Ed Johnson. What makes this case extraordinary isn't just the horrific crime—it's what happened next. The Supreme Court of the United States, for the first and only time in its entire history, directly prosecuted a criminal case. No lower court involvement. No appeals process. The justices themselves took on a murder investigation.
How is that even possible?
The answer lies in one of the Constitution's more obscure provisions: original jurisdiction. Most people think of the Supreme Court as the final stop in a long legal journey—the place where cases go after winding through trial courts and appeals courts for years. And that's usually true. But there's a back door. A small set of cases can skip the line entirely and start at the top.
What Original Jurisdiction Actually Means
To understand original jurisdiction, you first need to understand its opposite: appellate jurisdiction. When the Supreme Court reviews a case on appeal, it's looking at what lower courts already decided. Did the trial judge make an error? Did the appeals court misinterpret the law? The Supreme Court isn't finding facts or hearing witness testimony—it's reviewing the legal reasoning of courts below.
Original jurisdiction flips this entirely. When the Supreme Court exercises original jurisdiction, it acts like a trial court. It's the first court to hear the case. There's no prior ruling to review because no other court has touched it yet.
This creates an odd image: nine justices, appointed for life and normally occupied with constitutional philosophy, suddenly needing to deal with the messy business of gathering evidence, evaluating witness credibility, and finding facts. It's a bit like asking a panel of distinguished professors to also run the campus parking office.
The Constitutional Blueprint
Article Three, Section Two of the Constitution lays out exactly when this happens. The relevant passage is remarkably short:
In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction.
That's it. Two categories. Cases involving foreign diplomats, and cases involving states.
The logic behind this isn't hard to grasp. The framers of the Constitution worried about what would happen if, say, France's ambassador got into a legal dispute with someone in Virginia. Could Virginia's courts be trusted to handle it fairly? Would France accept a verdict from a state tribunal? By routing these cases directly to the Supreme Court, the framers created a neutral forum with undeniable authority.
The same thinking applies to disputes between states. If New York and New Jersey disagree about where their border lies, neither state's courts can fairly decide. Both have skin in the game. The Supreme Court, representing the federal government that sits above both states, becomes the only logical referee.
The Marbury Moment
One of the most consequential Supreme Court decisions in American history—Marbury versus Madison from 1803—actually centered on original jurisdiction. The details matter because they established a principle that still shapes American law today.
William Marbury had been appointed as a justice of the peace by outgoing President John Adams. But when Thomas Jefferson took office, his administration refused to deliver Marbury's commission. Without the physical document, Marbury couldn't take his position. So he went directly to the Supreme Court, asking for a writ of mandamus—essentially a court order commanding Jefferson's Secretary of State to hand over the paperwork.
Marbury's legal basis seemed solid. The Judiciary Act of 1789, passed by Congress, explicitly gave the Supreme Court the power to issue such writs. Open and shut, right?
Chief Justice John Marshall saw it differently. The Constitution, he reasoned, lists exactly which cases the Supreme Court can hear originally. Marbury's case—a dispute with a government official over a job commission—wasn't on the list. Congress couldn't expand the Constitution's grant of original jurisdiction just by passing a statute.
This meant the relevant portion of the Judiciary Act was unconstitutional. And with that, Marshall established judicial review—the power of courts to strike down laws that violate the Constitution. It was a masterstroke of legal reasoning. By ruling against his own court's power in this specific case, Marshall claimed a far greater power for the judiciary as a whole.
Self-Executing Power
An earlier case, Chisholm versus Georgia from 1793, established something equally important. The Supreme Court ruled that its original jurisdiction was self-executing. This technical term means the Court didn't need Congress to pass any additional laws before it could start hearing these cases. The constitutional text alone was enough.
Think of it like a light switch that's already connected to power. You don't need to call an electrician before flipping it. The moment the Constitution was ratified, the Supreme Court's original jurisdiction was live.
The Numbers Tell a Story
Despite this constitutional authority, the Supreme Court almost never uses its original jurisdiction. The statistics are striking.
Between 1789 and 1959—a span of 170 years—the Court issued written opinions in only 123 original jurisdiction cases. That works out to less than one case per year. Since 1960, the Court has received fewer than 140 requests to file original cases, and it rejected nearly half of those without even granting a hearing.
Today, the Court typically handles just one or two original jurisdiction cases per term. In a docket of roughly 100 to 150 decided cases annually, original jurisdiction represents a sliver of the workload.
What These Cases Actually Look Like
The overwhelming majority of original jurisdiction cases involve states fighting over boundaries and water.
This makes sense when you think about it. State borders are often defined by rivers, and rivers move. They flood, they shift course, they dry up. When the Rio Grande or the Delaware River changes path, which state gets the newly formed land? These aren't abstract questions—they affect taxation, law enforcement, property rights, and resource extraction.
Water rights cases are even more contentious. The Colorado River, for example, supplies water to seven western states plus Mexico. Every drop allocated to California is a drop that Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado don't get. When states can't reach agreements on their own, the Supreme Court becomes the arbiter.
Kansas versus Colorado, decided over the Arkansas River's water rights, exemplifies these disputes. Both states needed the water for agriculture. Both had reasonable claims. The Court had to balance competing interests that couldn't easily be reconciled.
New Jersey versus Delaware, decided as recently as 2008, traced back to colonial-era boundaries and navigable water rights. The legal questions intertwined centuries-old charter grants from English kings with modern environmental and commerce law.
The Practical Problem
Here's the awkward reality: the Supreme Court is terrible at conducting trials.
Trial courts need to gather evidence, schedule witness testimony, manage discovery processes, and make factual determinations. They need clerks familiar with procedural rules, courtrooms designed for extended proceedings, and judges experienced in running complex litigation. The Supreme Court has none of this infrastructure. Its courtroom is designed for oral arguments lasting an hour, not multi-week trials. Its justices are selected for legal brilliance, not case management skills.
The solution? Special masters.
When the Supreme Court accepts an original jurisdiction case, it typically appoints someone else to do the actual work. This special master—usually a prominent lawyer or lower court judge—conducts the proceedings that would normally happen in a trial court. They gather evidence, hear testimony, and prepare a detailed report with recommendations.
The justices then review the special master's report. They can accept it, reject it, or modify it. Parties can file exceptions arguing the special master got something wrong. But the heavy lifting happens elsewhere.
This process can take years. Water rights cases, with their complex technical evidence about river flows and historical usage patterns, have sometimes dragged on for decades.
Exclusive Versus Concurrent
Not all original jurisdiction is created equal. The law distinguishes between exclusive and concurrent jurisdiction.
For disputes between two or more states, the Supreme Court has exclusive original jurisdiction. The emphasis matters. No other court in America—federal or state—can hear these cases. If Texas and Oklahoma disagree about their border, the Supreme Court is literally the only forum available.
For other original jurisdiction matters, like cases involving ambassadors, the jurisdiction is concurrent. This means lower federal courts can also hear these cases. In practice, this usually means the Supreme Court doesn't have to. A foreign diplomat's traffic ticket doesn't need to go directly to the Chief Justice.
The Jury Question
Can you get a jury trial in a Supreme Court original jurisdiction case? The answer is complicated.
In 1794, the case of Georgia versus Brailsford actually used a jury to determine factual issues. This remains the only time it's happened. The Seventh Amendment guarantees jury trials in civil cases at law—meaning cases seeking money damages, as opposed to equity cases seeking injunctions or other non-monetary relief.
Federal law explicitly provides that in original actions at law before the Supreme Court involving United States citizens, issues of fact shall be tried by a jury. But this provision has essentially become a dead letter. When Louisiana requested a jury trial in 1950, the Court ruled the case was an equity matter, not a legal one, so no jury was required. The Court noted the statutory right to a jury existed but didn't decide whether it would actually apply in a true action at law.
Since virtually all original jurisdiction cases involve states seeking declaratory judgments or injunctions rather than money damages, the jury question remains theoretical.
Political Cases and Their Limits
Sometimes parties try to use original jurisdiction for overtly political purposes. The Supreme Court has generally slammed that door shut.
In December 2020, Texas filed an original jurisdiction case against Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The claim? That these states had violated the Constitution by changing their election procedures through executive or judicial action rather than through their state legislatures. Texas asked the Supreme Court to invalidate millions of votes and potentially swing the presidential election.
The Court dismissed the case without even granting a full hearing. The reason was standing—the legal doctrine that requires a party to show they've been personally harmed by the defendant's conduct. Texas couldn't demonstrate that another state's election procedures injured Texas in any cognizable way. The dismissal was unanimous, with even the justices appointed by President Trump agreeing that Texas had no business challenging how Pennsylvania ran its elections.
The Lynching Case Revisited
Which brings us back to United States versus Shipp, that extraordinary 1906 criminal case.
Ed Johnson had been convicted of rape by an all-white jury in Tennessee. His lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court, which granted a stay of execution while it considered the case. The stay meant Johnson couldn't be executed until the Court ruled.
A Chattanooga mob ignored the stay. With the apparent cooperation of the local sheriff, Joseph Shipp, they broke into the jail and lynched Johnson. This wasn't just murder—it was contempt of the Supreme Court itself. The mob had deliberately defied a direct order from the highest court in the land.
The Court appointed a commissioner to gather evidence and eventually held a trial of sorts, though it took place through depositions rather than live testimony. Sheriff Shipp and several others were found guilty of contempt. The sheriff received a ninety-day sentence—hardly proportionate to his role in a murder, but symbolically significant.
The case demonstrated that original jurisdiction could theoretically apply to criminal matters, but the circumstances were so unusual—a direct assault on the Court's own authority—that it's never happened again.
Why This Matters Today
Original jurisdiction might seem like a constitutional curiosity, relevant only to border disputes and water rights. But it reveals something important about how the American legal system was designed.
The framers understood that some disputes simply couldn't be resolved by ordinary courts. When states clash, when foreign diplomats need protection, when the integrity of the Court itself is challenged, someone has to step in with undeniable authority. Original jurisdiction provides that backstop.
It also reminds us that the Supreme Court isn't purely an appellate body floating above the fray. It can, when necessary, get its hands dirty with the messy business of finding facts and making initial determinations. That it almost never does so speaks to practical limitations rather than constitutional constraints.
The nine justices aren't equipped to run a trial court. But the power remains there, encoded in Article Three, waiting for the rare case that truly requires it.