Discretionary jurisdiction is a circumstance where a

court A court is any person or institution, often as a government institution, with the authority to adjudicate legal disputes between parties and carry out the administration of justice in civil, criminal, and administrative matters in acco ...

has the power to decide whether to hear a particular case brought before it. Most courts have no such power, and must entertain any case properly filed, so long as the court has

subject matter jurisdiction Subject-matter jurisdiction (also called jurisdiction ''ratione materiae')'' is the authority of a court to hear cases of a particular type or cases relating to a specific subject matter. For instance, bankruptcy court only has the authority ...

over the questions of law which must be decided, and

in personam jurisdiction Personal jurisdiction is a court's jurisdiction over the ''parties'', as determined by the facts in evidence, which bind the parties to a lawsuit, as opposed to subject-matter jurisdiction, which is jurisdiction over the ''law'' involved in the ...

over the parties to the case. Typically, the highest court in a state or country will have discretionary jurisdiction. The reason for this is that appellate courts in

common law In law, common law (also known as judicial precedent, judge-made law, or case law) is the body of law created by judges and similar quasi-judicial tribunals by virtue of being stated in written opinions."The common law is not a brooding omniprese ...

countries have two basic functions: "error correction" and "law declaring." The "error correction" function means that the appellate court simply examines the record and determines whether the lower court applied existing law correctly, and reverses and remands (sends the case back) for severe errors. That is, the parties may generally agree on the applicable law, but the appellant will contend that the trial court incorrectly interpreted and applied the existing law. The "law declaring" function means that the appellate court rules on novel issues in a case, and under ''stare decisis'', those rulings become new law in themselves. In those cases, the parties disagree vigorously if any existing legal rule even applies to the facts of the case, or the appellant may be deliberately trying to attack an established rule in the hope that the appellate court will overturn a prior decision and establish a new rule, or the question has been ruled upon by multiple intermediate appellate courts and is so perplexing that all the lower courts disagree with each other. An appellate court with discretionary jurisdiction is able to delegate error correction to lower courts, while it focuses its limited resources on developing case law properly. In the latter situation, the appellate court will focus on truly novel questions or revisiting older legal rules that are now clearly obsolete or unconstitutional. For example, the

United States Supreme Court The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that involve a point o ...

hears cases by a

writ of certiorari In law, ''certiorari'' is a court process to seek judicial review of a decision of a lower court or government agency. ''Certiorari'' comes from the name of an English prerogative writ, issued by a superior court to direct that the record of ...

, essentially meaning that it calls appellants up to the court only if their case is important enough to merit the resources of the court. The Supreme Court employs a "rule of four", meaning that four justices have to think the case is important enough to hear before the court will grant it review. Many

state supreme court In the United States, a state supreme court (known by other names in some states) is the highest court in the state judiciary of a U.S. state. On matters of state law, the judgment of a state supreme court is considered final and binding in b ...

s use a similar process to choose which cases they will hear.

References

Civil procedure Jurisdiction {{Law-term-stub