everyone this is professor tracy and this lecture is an introduction to constitutional law and my purpose with this is to remind you of many of the things i'm sure you've learned in the past about how government works and to introduce you to some broad concepts that we'll be revisiting throughout this course so i hope it's helpful and one thing i encourage you to do it's listed in the assignments but be sure to at least give a quick read through the us constitution that's in the appendix to our case book because that'll give you some more context to a lot of the concepts and things that i'm talking about in this video so as we think about the us constitution the first thing broadly we want to think about is that there are seven different articles to the constitution the first sets up the legislative branch or congress the second the executive branch the president the vice president and all the executive agencies article 3 deals with the judicial branch so the u.s supreme court and all the lower federal courts the circuit courts and the federal district courts and then article four deals with the states so it lays out the process by which new states can be admitted into the united states and it also spells out how rights work when someone is traveling between states and what protections a state must provide to someone if they're from another state and then article 5 is the process by which the constitution may be amended article 6 covers a few different things but for our purposes the most important is the supremacy clause and that tells us that this constitution and the laws pass pursuant to it and the treaties that are agreed to under it that those constitute the law of the land they are the supreme law of the land so that's what we mean by the supremacy clause which we'll revisit throughout the course and then finally article 7 deals with the process of ratifying the constitution if you're familiar at all with the history of the constitution you know that even upon its ratification there were already amendments to it to date there have been 27 amendments to the constitution the first ten are referred to as the bill of rights so the bill of rights at these ten uh just we're going to run through them so the first deals with the free exercise of religion the establishment of religion and speech and the freedom of the press the second amendment deals with the right to bear arms the third amendment deals with the right to not have soldiers quartered in your house during peace time the fourth amendment deals with unreasonable searches and seizures so you have a right against unreasonable searches and seizures and a requirement that if there is a search to be done a warrant is required in order to show probable cause on on is showing a probable cause the fifth amendment deals with several things but one is that there is a requirement of an indictment or an information before a grand jury so you must have a grand jury finding in a criminal case and there must be due process so there's the due process clause of the fifth amendment the sixth amendment deals with the rights of the criminally accused so things like a right to counsel the right to confront the witnesses presented against you and right to a speedy trial right to trial by jury all those things are encompassed by the sixth amendment seventh amendment is similar but it deals with civil cases and similarly provides a right to trial by jury but does not obviously provide all the other rights that are in the sixth amendment the eighth amendment provides a right against excessive fines and bail and punishments um and then the ninth amendment says that the enumeration of these rights in the first eight eight amendments does not mean there are not other rights so basically the idea that the expression of some rights does not mean that other rights are excluded and the tenth amendment is referring back to the constitution the amendments in the constitution saying that the powers that have not been delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states and to the people and we will go through these amendments in various levels of detail throughout this course when we think about the bill of rights one of the questions that comes up is to whom is it or like who does it protect someone from it gives someone rights but who does it protect them against so the obvious answer is the federal government after all that's what the the constitution is establishing is one national federal government um but the other thing that it has over time been interpreted to mean at least in piecemeal is that it protects people against the state government as well as what we call the political subdivisions of the state things like county governments city governments um any you know any other sort of you know school board thing like that things like that that would be considered a political subdivision of the state what has happened over time is that the u.s supreme court has incorporated these rights from the first 10 amendments to apply them to to the states and that process is known as selective incorporation and what that means is that although some rights have been incorporated to apply to the states and at this point a lot of them but not all of them so if which ones haven't been well the first is the third amendment which has yet to be incorporated at least by the u.s supreme court the second circuit has said well in our circuit it is incorporated to apply to the state and the political subdivisions of the state remember the third amendment is the right against having soldiers quartered in your house during peace time the fact of the matter is it just doesn't come up very much in modern times so it's unlikely to be presented to the supreme court i guess it could be at some point but i'm not sure the supreme court has had the opportunity to consider whether or not to incorporate it then the other one that has not been incorporated is the at least part of the fifth amendment and that is the their the part of it that requires a grand jury indictment that has been said not to be incorporated not required that states abide by them they don't need to have grand juries and indictments and things like that and then finally the seventh amendment the the part of the seventh amendment that has yet to be incorporated is the right to a trial by jury in a civil case in a civil case so you have a right to a jury in a criminal case but the seventh amendment the the portion of it dealing with the right to try by during a civil case has yet to be incorporated to apply to the states so when we think about the constitution as as a whole and the first 10 10 amendments we have to ask ourselves why what's the purpose why did the our founding fathers the framers of the constitution bother to do this and the first is something i referenced already and it's kind of obvious but it's worth saying that its purpose was to establish a national federal government remember prior to this we had the articles of confederation so we had we didn't have a strong central federal government we had a loose confederation of states so part of what was intended here with the u.s constitution was to establish a strong national federal government also the constitution is allocating power between the states and the federal government as you are aware we have states and we have a national federal government and they both have their own governments and the question arises of how do those governments relate to each other how is power distributed between them we call that federalism federalism and then the other thing the constitution is doing is distributing power between the three primary branches of the federal government between the legislative branch the executive branch and the judicial branch we call that separation of powers and so those are phrases i'm sure you've heard but our focus since the first one is you know rather obvious that yes it's establishing a national federal government it doesn't need to really be explained more but it is important to understand that that marks a change from the articles of confederation and so we're going to start by asking ourselves well what does it mean to allocate power between the states and the federal government as i said that's called federalism federalism so as we think about this we're going to focus in on legislative power that is the difference between the kind of a legislative power that a state would have and the kind of legislative power that congress has so for thinking about a state like our own florida that you need to think of the fact that states they pre-existed the the creation of the federal government and they have what we call a general police power which means state legislators can pass any legislation that promotes the health the safety the welfare of their citizens they do not need to point to some enumerated power unless their own state constitution requires them to you know hang their legislation on some power enumerated in it but as far as the federal constitution is required that the states are viewed as having broad general police power they can legislate anything that promotes the health the safety and the wealth of their citizens in contrast the federal government has only enumerated power so whenever congress passes legislation it must tie that legislation to some enumerated power within the u.s constitution it does not have blanket police power to just say well this is good for for the citizens of the united states it's it's good for their health their safety their welfare so we can do that no they have to point to an enumerated power in the u.s constitution and say this is why we have the power to pass this and so if we're thinking about federal power what are the restraints on federal power well first is one i just referenced that there is a big difference that because the federal government only has the powers that have been delegated to it it is necessarily limited right it's only the limit the enumerated powers within the us constitution that the federal government has and i also reference the 10th amendment when we were walking through the bill of rights but it specifically says that the powers that have not been delegated to the united states constitute by the constitution to the federal government then or as it points out not prohibited to the states meaning the constitution could do either or both then are reserved to the states or to the people themselves so that that has been interpreted we'll see over time to act as a what's called a structural limitation a structural limitation on the federal government's power to legislate that there are some things that are within the domain of the state governments that are beyond the power of the federal government to reach and then we'll see throughout this course that one of the restraints is individual rights and we've enumerated some of those in the bill of rights there are certainly others throughout the constitution and in the subsequent amendments if you think about the 14th amendment the 13th 15th and on and on 19th you know we could start picking out various amendments that provide other rights those rights act as restraints on federal power then there so that's kind of looking at the balance of legislative power between the federal government and the state the state having broad legislative power and the federal government having narrower needing to tie itself to an enumerated power in the u.s constitution let's look at the overall structure of the government so we're looking at the federal government and as we've said we've got article one gives us the legislative branch article 2 the executive and article 3 the judicial branch these branches if you think of legislative we said it's congress we have what's called a bicameral legislator meaning has two houses there is the senate and the house of representatives when we think of the executive branch we have the president the vice president and the cabinet which we'll explore in detail in a minute and then all of the executive agencies like the department of justice the department of the interior uh the department of uh of energy or now it's called the environmental protection agency um you know department of agriculture all these things are agencies which are part of the executive branch which we'll talk about more in just a few minutes the judicial branch is comprised of the u.s supreme court all the other federal courts and then there are judicial agencies that deal with kind of they're considered part of article three part of the article three court system but are not technically themselves courts but they serve various functions to serve the courts so as we think about the power what is it that the legislative branch does it makes laws what does the executive branch does do it carries out the law it executes the law right which is why it's called the executive branch then we have the judicial branch it judges or evaluates the laws and we have separation of powers between these three branches and so there's this famous quote by james madison and for us he says you must first enable the government to control the governed and in the next place oblige it to control itself meaning we've got to have checks right that the government needs to be forced to control itself because we don't trust that it will that it will restrain itself and so we don't want any one of the branches to have all the power so we have we don't want too much power to be aggrandized to any particular branch and so the constitution is structured so that that's not the case and so we talk about a system of checks and balances where we talk about the ability of the branches to respond to the actions of the other branches when we talk about a check what we mean here is if we look at these three branches is that they can in some way limit or negate the action of another branch so if we talk about the president the president can veto legislation passed by congress the president also nominates officers right he not and most importantly is all the justices of the supreme in terms of the judiciary at least most importantly would be the nominating the justices and all of the federal judges so the executive branch serves as a check on the power of the um on the power of the judicial branch then when we think about congress what does it do it can confirm or reject the president's nominees it can confirm or reject those nominees we've seen that quite recently with the supreme court um and that's true with parts of the executive branch as well if you think about any of these the heads you think about the attorney general or the secretary of education those are all people that the president nominates and must be confirmed or rejected by the senate so there is this power to keep in check the executive branch and and turn up power to keep in check also the judicial branch because they can reject judges or uh justices that have been nominated by the executive branch the and then remember here that obviously by impeachment congress can remove the president the other thing they can do which i didn't know here is they can impeach a judge right if a judge is if it meets the standard that a judge may be impeached as well so that that serves also as a check on the the judicial branch so what about the court itself this is probably obvious but it has the right of judicial review it reviews legislation passed by congress and actions taken by the executive branch and can determine that those are unconstitutional and literally strike them down or you know kind of veto those actions so what do we mean by balances well what we mean by balances so checks is one branch sort of limiting or checking the power of another branch when we talk about balancing we're saying that no one branch can act on its own that so in order for congress to legislate for the legislative branch to pass a law it requires actually two branches right to enact a law we need both congress and the president to act and in order to enforce a law it requires both the executive branch and the us and the supreme court or another way to say that is the executive branch and the judicial branch in order to enforce that right because the law is executed by the executive branch so for instance the department of justice is part of the executive branch the fbi is part of the executive branch so all you know all of these things that we think about enforcing the law and then those people are what if someone is going to be convicted of a crime then they would be brought to the judicial branch and then the judicial branch would be the next step in that process of enforcing the law so it requires both branches so you always need two branches to act that's what we mean by the balance part of the phrase checks and balances so let's look at each branch in a little more detail so if we're thinking about congress we've already said it has two houses the house of representatives and the senate if we're thinking about the house of representatives there are 435 representatives and they have each representative in the house has two year terms and there are no term limits for representatives in the house right and so the other thing to realize is we just had a census in 2020 and so the districts are being redrawn but they're still only 435 representatives so some states are gaining representatives and others are losing so it's based on population the way that uh we we do the districting in the the uh in them for the house representatives based on the census and that means that that's kind of fluid although the number 435 stays the same that the districts change um and who how many states have how many representatives change based on population so if we look at our own state we currently have 27 districts and they're like i said earlier they're portioned by population the districts have been redrawn this year i've got an asterisk there because it's been really messy very messy but in light of the 2020 census there has been these redistricting plans that have been offered they've been controversial but as it stands right now and presumably this will be the case we in florida are gaining a district so there will be 28 districts for this 2020 midterm election that will be in november and so the law school historically now historically or you know prior to this redistricting was in the 25th district and we will be in the 26th so they're being renumbered as in because in part because they're being redrawn but um we are uh we're in the 25th we will be in the 26th as soon as that plan is finalized we'll we'll be in the 26th but our representative remains the same although he's up so representative ballard is a republican he is our representative for the district that the law school sits in and uh if re-elected will continue to be so when we think about the senate still talking about the legislative branch there are 100 senators they're two per estate and they're they have six year terms and these terms are staggered what i mean by that is basically every two years a third of the center obviously there's a hundred it can't be perfectly a third um but about a third are up for re-election every two years and there again no term limits the the constitution itself establishes no term limits for senators or for representatives so when we thought talk about the executive branch we have the president the president according to the constitution is vested with the executive power they're deemed to be the quote leader of the federal government the commander-in-chief of the united states armed forces and uh the executive branch when we think about the president excuse me before i move on the vice president president we you all know this president has a four year term there's a two term limit and um when we think about the vice president the vice president is is has a very undefined job in the united states constitution right they support the president that are president when the the president when the president is unfit the other thing which i don't think i mention here if there is a tie in because we have an even number of senators in uh in the senate if there's a tie then the vice president breaks those ties so um the the vice president serves for the same year four-year term as the president but interestingly enough the vice president has no term limit so somebody could be a vice president for multiple presidents things like this have happened historically but not recently but there is no term limit for vice president so you could be vice president under multiple presidents which is always an interesting thing um which seems very foreign i think to our sort of modern sensibilities when we think about the executive branch the thing that most people do not think about is that all of the executive agencies all these departments that you've heard heard about and these agencies you've heard about and you read about those are all part of the executive their job is to help execute the law to carry out that the laws that are passed by congress so they are part of the executive branch they are supervised by the president united states and when people talk about the bloat of the federal government largely what they're talking about is the increase in executive agencies the number and the size of those agencies and so i don't list them all here but there are a lot so if you think about the department of justice the department of state or the state department the department of agriculture the department of labor the department of treasury department of the interior you could go excuse me and on and on right the environmental protection agency um health and human services the department of homeland security there are tons and tons of departments that we could list and but there are what we call 15 main agencies and the reason we say this and i'm not again not going to list them all but the heads of these 15 agencies make up the president's cabinet and so these are some this is only six of the 15 departments and the heads of those departments are part of the cabinet and so we know that the department of justice would be the attorney general the department of labor to secretary of labor um the department of state is the secretary of state the department of treasury secretary of treasury right so the secretary of agriculture and secretary of interior right all those all those people right and they make up the cabinet they're advising the president and i know there i don't have 15 people i've only got 12 but again it's just an example there are 15 and there are 15 heads that make up the cabinet so one of the things to think about when we think about the the senate and when we think about um the house of representatives is well how does a bill become law and again i know you know this but just to remind you so any member of congress whether from the senate or from the house of representatives may introduce legislation then that piece of legislation will be introduced then it is given to the relevant committee right senate committee or house committee then assuming it is voted out of committee and a lot of times let it be said legislation never makes it out of committee but assuming it gets voted out of committee either on the house side or the senate side it then gets to the chamber floor and is put to a vote if there is a majority vote by one chamber saying the senate for instance or the house of representatives then it gets sent to the other chamber where again it would likely be sent to committee and then it would go again to the floor chamber and they would need a majority vote again to pass that legislation once we have a majority vote by both houses or chambers of congress then it would become law with the exception of sometimes what will happen is that the the bill that is passed is slightly different between in the senate and the house and then the bills need to be reconciled and typically then taken back out and voted again that voted on again by both houses um but often the reconciliation committee is made up of members from both chambers so presumably the expectation is it's now acceptable to both let's pass it and then it gets passed by majority vote in both chambers so once it is passed by both chambers of congress then we it gets sent to the president the president then has basically three options we already said that to pass a law we need both the action of the legislative branch and the executive branch so this is where the executive branch comes in the president could sign the bill into law president could veto that meaning saying nope i'm not going to sign it i'm going to nix the law or do nothing for 10 days so well what happens if it's signed it becomes law what happens if the president vetoes it it's not a law at that point but congress can override the veto by a two-thirds vote of both houses so not a bare majority but a two-thirds vote in each chamber or house would then make it become law override the veto of the president and if the president does nothing for 10 days then it what happens is going to turn on is congress in session or not at the conclusion of those 10 days so if it's in session then the bill automatically becomes law if if it's not in session then that is what we refer to as a pocket veto meaning the president sat on it for the 10-day window and because congress wasn't in session that kills the law so that's called a pocket veto so the president ostensibly can say well i didn't veto it i didn't veto it it just died because i didn't do anything with it and you weren't in session too bad so that's referred to as a pocket veto as we said and then if we're thinking about article 3 we're talking about the courts where we know that their job is to interpret the law to apply the law to individual cases and to decide if the law violates the us constitution that's called judicial review right reviewing a law or action by the executive branch to determine if it can comports with the u.s constitution if it does not then striking it down so what is the composition of the judicial branch well in terms of our court system there is one supreme court there are when we think think about the u.s courts of appeal there are 13 in total there are 11 numbered circuits we sit in the 11th circuit which we'll talk about in a second um and then there is the dc circuit and the federal circuit the federal circuit is unique and then it has national jurisdiction it deals with a number of very specific types of cases as dealing some with patents and things like that but there's some others that it also covers and then with district courts in total there are 94 u.s district courts across the country so if we look at our own state or how many courts do we have there are three federal districts in florida you look at the map there you can see that we refer to these as the northern middle and southern districts however just realize it's going from it's going from sort of west to east um and yet we're still calling them northern middle and southern um but it is kind of not necessarily divided up the the way you would think right it's more that it's like horizontally striped rather than excuse me i got that backwards it's vertically striped rather than horizontal and so we sit in the 11th circuit court of appeals the law school itself naples is in the middle district you can see that down here that collier county sits in the very very southern end of the middle district of florida and the federal courthouse if you're aware is up in lee county up in fort myers so that's where the middle district sits uh at least the courthouse for for us so then with the u.s supreme court that's chief justice roberts and you all know it's the highest court in the u.s there are nine justices at the u.s supreme court the justices are nominated by the president confirmed by the senate and you might think well isn't it five tracing not six what i mean by a minimum of six to decide a case there is not that five of the nine need to to you know vote in favor of a particular judgment or opinion what i mean is there must be six of the nine sitting for a case to be decided so if for some reason there were less than six that were if we had four of them gone and there were only five justices left on the court for some reason they could not hear a case we need to at least appoint one more justice before they can get back to deciding cases so we need a minimum of six justices sitting in order for them to decide cases and when there is an even number of justice so that might be the other question that comes up is well what if we have six the more common thing is that we have eight right that happens pretty regularly when a justice retires or dies then we have eight at least for a period of time and the question arises is well what happens with a case if there's a tie four four or if the minimum of six is there three three then a time means is that the lower court decision stands it's an it's an affirmation of the lower court so remember that in terms of tenure u.s supreme court judge justices have lifetime appointment as do the federal judges they have lifetime appointments how does a case get to the u.s supreme court it's a good question one is original jurisdiction and the other is appeal from the u.s circuit court of appeals we just said that there are um we said there are 13 right 11 numbered and then dc circuit in the federal circuit and the other way would be up from an appeal from a state supreme court like our own florida supreme court so when we think about original jurisdiction what we mean by that is that a case can be brought initially in the us supreme court it's rare and we the the statute that lays that out is 20 us code section 12 51 but article 3 itself lists set lists saying here are the here are the types of cases to which there is article original jurisdiction in the supreme court the most common example is when one state is suing another state i just pick georgia and florida randomly here just because they're right next to each other recently the most common examples of things like this have been um dealing with water rights things like that although if i'm recalling correctly i think in the wake of the 2020 election i think texas brought suit against some of the other states um dealing with basically the counting of votes and the election results and so that too could be brought uh the supreme court would have original jurisdiction assuming it's one state suing another state but that's the most common example when we think about appellate jurisdiction there are we we already kind of covered this in the sense that we said you could either come up through the federal court system which would mean you go to the u.s district court in our case the middle district of florida then up to the 11th circuit and then you would petition for what's called certiorari or cert and then the u.s supreme court has discretionary review meaning it doesn't have to take your repeal on the state court side if we look at our own there is here we have florida we are sitting in the 20th circuit court and then there's county court just depending on the amount and controversy that determines where you go um and then our appellate court for where we are in florida is the second district court of appeal and uh we then we have the florida supreme court then so you could and we'll talk about this more in a second because not every case can necessarily be appealed from the state supreme court to the u.s supreme court but assuming it it is one of the cases where it could be brought to the u.s supreme court it's again discretionary review you would petition for certiorari and the supreme court would decide whether or not to take the case when we think about this and it's gonna when we think about well can i appeal from a state supreme court you have to be sure that the issue you're appealing turns on an issue of federal law and so what i mean by this is there's this idea of adequate and independent state ground so if you think about the ground here underneath this state supreme court decision and on the left here we've got if we've got the federal law on the right we've got state law and so in if a decision is based on federal law a state court decision is resting solely in federal law then they can obviously the supreme court could take that you could you could petition the supreme court for review and they could take it because it it turns on an issue of federal law so that's why the sun is shining but it gets a little more dicey if you're saying well it rests on an issue of federal law but it also deals with state law and so the standard we talk about here is if the decision rests on what's called an adequate and independent state law grounds meaning the federal law part of the decision is not necessary for the outcome if there's an adequate and independent basis for the decision on state law then you would not be able to get review that's the case of michigan v law where the supreme court said if there's an adequate and independent state crown for the decision then the supreme court will not accept review and if it does accidentally it will dismiss it and by saying that cert was in was improvidently granted that it should not have done so because there was an adequate and independent state ground so it's a little more dicey the sun's kind of setting on you and obviously if it rests entirely on state law then lights out you're not going to be able to petition the u.s supreme court because there are no issues of federal law so they're not going to consider it so let's look at a more concrete example i tried to pick a case that is interesting to most people which is the 2000 case of dale v boy scouts and you may or may not be familiar with the case it's a case from 2000 in which the um a scout master who um he had been an eagle scout he had been a scout master for a bit and then the boy scouts found out that he was a gay man and they uh excluded him they said no you can no longer be a scout master because you're gay and the um dale so dale was his name dale turn and i presumably still alive i don't know but it hasn't been that long and he wasn't that old but who knows but um so the new jersey lad is there on the right side representing the state law so dale sued under the new jersey ladder the new jersey law against discrimination saying that the boy scouts were discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation by excluding him refusing to allow him to be a scout master and the boy scouts defended on the basis of the first amendment they raised something called the right of expressive association their argument was that if the state law requires us to make dale a scout master then that violates our expressive association rights because one of the values we're trying to teach the boys that are scouts is that um is that engaging in what they refer to as just homosexual conduct as being inconsistent with being with a scout oath with the scout that those things were inconsistent and so if they were forced to make him a scout master that would mean they are forced to talk out of both sides of their mouth right on the one side we're trying to teach a particular set of values to the scouts on in our care and on the other hand though you're forcing us to condone the same conduct that we're saying is inconsistent with being a scout and that is violating our first amendment rights it's forcing us to express something that's contrary to the values that we believe and teach and so there was a federal defense but there was a state law cause of action and the case went to the it was filed in state court worked its way up through the new jersey supreme court and the new jersey supreme court decided it this way it said that the scouts had violated the new jersey law against discrimination by kicking dale out of the scouts and they then said that the first amendment defense didn't work because the scouts first amendment rights were not in fact violated by requiring them to make make dale a scout master and so if you think about this decision it there isn't an adequate and independent state ground right because they needed to decide both issues to rule in favor of of the uh of dale because they needed to decide both under state law that the scouts had violated the state law about discrimination and that the scouts first amendment defense federal law did not did not succeed and so both were required and so because it rested not on adequate and independent state grounds they could petition the supreme court for review and indeed they did and the supreme court granted cert and decided the case and reversed right decided that um at least on first amendment ground they reversed right they didn't change the ruling that the scouts had violated the new jersey law against discrimination but ruled that it violated the first amendment for new jersey to force the scouts to have uh dale be a scout master so if the law had been different so let me think of it this way the one way they could have put it on just state that the state supreme court could have said this is we're going to decide this solely on state grounds they could have said you know what the new jersey law against discrimination doesn't actually apply to a non-profit organization like the scouts and so they would never have to have reached the first amendment issue that would be entirely an issue about the applicability of the state law against discrimination the lad and so that that's not how the case went but if it had then there would be an adequate and independent state ground even though a first amendment defense was argued the independent state ground was that the the state supreme court said that this state law of ours doesn't apply to non-profit organizations like the scouts they could have decided that indeed states like california have decided that their laws against discrimination don't apply to for instance private religious schools or to the scouts so could have gone that way it didn't and because it didn't they decided both the federal and the state laws but if that were the case then you know it was entirely on state ground the supreme court would have not taken it well let's talk about the petition process we've said you can get there with appellate jurisdiction um but what is that process you file what's called a petition for certiorari or cert and then it's reviewed and the justices are looking essentially there are two big things which is either was called a circuit split meaning that there are two circuits deciding this issue of federal law two different ways sometimes it could be three or four circuits deciding it all different ways or using different tasks or whatever it may be or the court looks at it and says regardless of the lack of any split or inconsistency among the circuit courts it's an important issue of federal law it raises an important federal question sometimes or or maybe even oftentimes that could be that a lower federal court has said this federal law violates the united states constitution and that's a important thing for the court to kind of fare it out and decide well is that true is it not true then we need to you know work that out so there's not inconsistency across the country or it you know the law is not applicable only in one circuit something like that that could be an instance where there's an important federal question in order for cert to be granted remember it's discretionary review when you're petitioning for cert you need four of the nine justices voting to grant cert four of the nine voting to grant certiorari so what are your chances if you look at the numbers this is about where they have fallen under chief justice roberts about only about 80 of the 7 000 to eight thousand petitions filed each turn which a term generally runs from about october until um usually like june sometime in june um sometimes early july but um that they're only granting about 80 of the seven to eight thousand petitions that are filed each term so if you kind of break that down realistically if we look at recent numbers there were about petitions and the supreme court denied right and then that means how many are they granting only about one percent only about one percent uh of those are granted so it's a very very small number of cases for which the u.s supreme court grants cerciari so just to tie this all up remember the purpose of the constitution it's to establish a national federal government pre previously we had a loose confederation of states it allocates power between the states and the federal government meaning it tells us about the relationship of the federal government and the stakeholder we call that federalism and then it distributes power between the three branches of the federal government so we call that a separation of powers so that's that's it i hope that's helpful as an introduction and to this course and to some of the concepts i'm sure you've heard before but this is a way to kind of remind yourself refresh your memory regarding those those rules and principles so i look forward to seeing you all in class bye