Start at the bottom of this chart to discover how cases reach the Supreme Court of the United States.

Supreme Court-CasetoDocket.jpg

How a Case Gets Heard by the Supreme Court

By Joseph P. Williams, Staff Writer |Jan. 12, 2017, at 4:13 p.m.

While the Supreme Court is arguably the nation's most influential branch of government – an august body whose decisions have the most direct impact on how most of us lead our lives – the cases it chooses to hear can sometimes seem random and the reasons why perhaps opaque.

A closer look at the court's workings reveals three paths a legal conflict can take to reach the nation's highest court: original jurisdiction, federal court appeals and an appeal emanating from a state supreme court matter.

Original jurisdiction means the Supreme Court can hear a case that's come to it directly, without the matter having gone through rulings and appeals in a lower court. This can involve a dispute between states, with no other federal court having jurisdiction over the case. Those matters, however, are pretty rare.

One significant example is New Jersey v. New York, a case from the court's 1998 term. The Garden State sued the Empire State in the Supreme Court over jurisdiction of Ellis Island's artificially expanded landmass, an issue dating to the 19th century. New Jersey won the fight.

The most common instance in which a case gets to the high court is after it's already been heard and decided in a lower federal court but has been appealed by a party in the federal system, with its 94 federal judicial districts and 12 regional appellate circuits.

To be heard at the Supreme Court level, a party has to file a petition seeking review of the case, and the high court's decisions whether to do so fall under two Latin-term classifications: If the court gives a thumbs-up and agrees to hear the matter, it has granted a petition for a writ of certiorari. If it rejects a petition for review, it has denied certiorari – or denied cert, for short.

Given the size of the federal judiciary, the Supreme Court gets thousands of petitions from parties who want to appeal a lower-court ruling, but it usually only grants cert in a relative handful of cases each session. Four of the nine justices have to vote yes for a case to proceed when the bench is at full capacity; it's uncertain how many justices must agree to put a case on the upcoming docket in the court's current eight-member configuration.

If the court denies cert in a case, it sometimes means it has agreed with a lower-court decision, but not always. The only certainty is that the last lower-court ruling stands.

Opponents of the Affordable Care Act took this route to challenge President Barack Obama's landmark legislative accomplishment.

Not long after Congress passed the law known as Obamacare, officials from Florida and other states tried to block the law on the grounds that it was unconstitutional. Following rulings in a federal court in Florida and the the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case: National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius.

The high court issued varied holdings in the case, ruling in favor of Obamacare's "individual mandate" insurance requirement but saying states could not be essentially forced to expand Medicaid coverage under the law.

Another famous Supreme Court case that emerged from the lower courts was the abortion-affirming Roe v. Wade, which involved rulings and appeals to the high court out of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.

The third route for a case to get to Washington is on appeal from a state supreme court, which has the last word on interpretation of state laws. The U.S. Supreme Court can choose to hear such a case if the legal conflict arises from issues connected to the U.S. Constitution or federal law.

For example, in Broom v. Ohio,– inmate Romell Broom challenged the Ohio Supreme Court's decision to give the state a do-over of his botched execution. In 2009, corrections officials spent two hours trying to inject the lethal drug cocktail before calling off the execution. Broom and his lawyers argued this amounted to a violation of the Constitution's ban of cruel and unusual punishment.