U.S Supreme Court Blog #2

                                         

In middle school, they briefly teach students the three branches of government: legislative, executive, and judicial. In high school, they elaborate more on what the three branches do - the legislative branch makes the laws, executive branch enforces them, and the judicial branch evaluates them. The video we watched in class jogged my memory on the specifics of the judicial system, more specifically, The Supreme Court. In this blog post, you will read about what new information I learned, what was important, most surprising, and how I felt about the video after watching it.

For reference, the videos that we watched in class are the following links: Supreme Court Part 1 and Supreme Court Part 2. 

Most of the video was general information that I knew. It informed the audience as to what the Supreme Court does and who it is made up of. Something that I learned from the video was understanding what an opinion was in the Supreme Court. I did my own research since it was new information to me that I learned from the video. Opinion - Supreme Court This link helped me understand what an opinion was, what types of opinions were, and how you can obtain it. From my findings, I understood that an opinion was a written document written by the Supreme Court Justices.   The opinions are separated into four categories (bench, slip,  preliminary, and bound). A picture of them is found below.

                        

        I would say the most important part of the video was knowing who the Supreme Court Justices were, how they get appointed, and what their roles were. Since the video was somewhat outdated, I made sure I found a current picture of the Supreme Court Justices, which is shown above. The Supreme Court Justice website helps answer all of the basic questions. To sum up the basic answers: the President nominates someone to the Supreme Court. Once nominated, they will serve the Supreme Court "as long as they choose" or unless they are impeached. I didn't find anything necessarily surprising. Yet, I would say the video was extremely eye opening and definitely helped me relearn some of the basics I've learned in the past.