“How did SCOTUS take up Roe v Wade?”
I’m not familiar with the all the incidental details of Roe, but for the Court to hear it (or hear any other case), either Norma McCorvey or her opponent (would that have been “Wade”) first had to petition the Court to accept the case. Of course, the side that asks to be heard is [almost] always the one that previously lost in the appellate courts.
Many more petitions to have cases heard are filed with the Court than are accepted by them. At their conferences, the Justices pick and choose what they will hear, based upon what [I guess] are a series of traditional criteria.
But unless and until McCorvey (or Wade) petitioned them to weigh the case, the Court would never decide the issue “on its own”. To believe otherwise is, well, fantasy.
This is why the Bush/Gore Florida vote-stealing case took awhile to be settled by the Court — the Justices could not act until the case was brought before them.
This is why ObamaCare is taking a while to wend its way up to the Supreme Court — because it had to be heard by the lower courts before it could be brought before the Supremes. And that was only after there had been conflicting opinions from more than one federal district court circuit.
But to petition is different than having a “case” - according to current rules of “standing”. Roe’s lawyers petitioned the court but SCOTUS acknowledged when they accepted the case that it technically didn’t meet the requirements to BE a “case”, because by that time Norma McCorvey already had her baby and so her case was not justiciable.
According to the claims of the lower courts, none of the people who petitioned SCOTUS to accept their eligibility case even HAD a “case”, because they lacked “standing”.
Maybe what we’ve got here is a misunderstanding. I should have said that SCOTUS could take up any petition before them regardless of whether the filer was granted legal “standing” by lower courts. That was what I meant. Would you still say that is not accurate? I didn’t mean to say that they could just decide they wanted to make a ruling about something not even presented to them. But the eligibility issue WAS presented to them - presumably because they had the option of accepting, hearing, and deciding the case - and they refused to take it up even though nothing was stopping them from doing so.