Through my reading of the History Channel's overview of the Supreme Court I learned a few new things about the Supreme Court. I did not know that the Chief Justice could just delegate the writing of the court decision to someone. I also did not know that Congress had gone back and forth with changing how many Supreme Court seats there would be. I learned that the 34 years that Chief Justice John Marshall served is still the longest term to this day.
One of the main takeaways if the article was that the Supreme Court holds a great deal of power and that how they rule on a case could have positive or negative lasting impacts on the country that also hold implications for future cases.
There was actually quite a few things that I wasn't expecting to learn while reading this article. For example, I was surprised that the very first case the Supreme Court heard was just a random financial dispute between a farmer and the family he was indebted to; it just seems kind of anticlimactic in a way. It was interesting that the chief justice is required to sit on the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institute; it just seems like such random position for them to have to hold. Reading that prayer in public schools was ruled to be a violation of the First Amendment in 1962 was something I did not expect. I was also surprised to learn that William Howard Taft also served as a Chief Justice, and is the only one so far to have served as Chief Justice and President.
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