Assertions by persons about to initiate a lawsuit, as well as by those who have already lost, that they will take their cases all the way to the United States Supreme Court undoubtedly bespeak their deeply felt intentions, but in most cases their avowals lack credibility. Individuals who wish to file a lawsuit must be proper parties, that is, they must have standing to sue. If they do have such credentials, they must also bring their cases to the proper forum: The court in question must have jurisdiction – the capability to resolve their dispute. Assuming that the plaintiff is a proper party and is in the proper forum, a third hurdle to Supreme Court resolution still remains: The justices themselves must deem the matter worthy of their consideration. The last is by far the most difficult to surmount.

Decisions about access, whether they concern proper parties or the proper forum, have important policy effects. Although such questions do not resolve the merits of the cases before the Court, they serve as a “gate” that litigants must pass through in order to obtain a meritorious resolution of their disputes. The policies that govern access, like decisions on the merits, impact and bind the operation of the judicial system generally. Analyses show that the Warren Court provided relatively open access, a policy that the Burger Court continued during its very early years. But by the mid-1970s, the Burger Court had established policies that narrowed access to the federal courts. The cited analyses both show that the individual justices' votes opening or closing access covary with their overall rankings on a general liberal-conservative dimension.