The rule of four and role of custom on the Supreme Court

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5, the first day of the 2026-27 term, a major focus will be on what new cases the court will add to its docket for oral argument and decision.

At the center of deciding what cases to decide is a 100-year-old custom known as the rule of four.

Simply put, this rule means that the court will hear a case when four justices vote in favor, even if a majority of justices did not want to do so.

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5, the first day of the 2026-27 term, a major focus will be on what new cases the court will add to its docket for oral argument and decision. At the center of deciding what cases to decide is a 100-year-old custom known as the rule of four. Simply put, this rule means that the court will hear a case when four justices vote in favor, even if a majority of justices did not want to do so.

How it works

As part of the negotiations in 1925, justices told Congress that they generally followed the practice of agreeing to hear and decide cases if there were four justices who wanted to do so.
Chief Justice William Howard Taft went farther and committed the court to the rule of four.
This sounds straightforward, but it comes with an interesting history and quite a few wrinkles.
In 1925, Congress passed another law that made petitions for certiorari the predominant way to appeal to the court and gave the justices a high degree of discretion to turn away cases by simply denying review.
This "rule" is not in the Constitution, nor part of any federal law, and it does not even appear in the court's own published rules.

What to take from it

In 1983, Justice John Paul Stevens actually <a href="https://access.heinonlin...

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