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The court only decides who decides
A library book fight
Take a fight over library books. People try to pull To Kill a Mockingbird off the shelves in a blue state, and others try to pull Tango Makes Three in a red state. A court looking at either fight asks who gets to decide what books are in the library, and what process shows whether the decision-makers did their job correctly.
The court is not Congress
The common picture of the court treats it like Congress, the presidency, or the midterms: a battle of right versus left, six justices against three, where the right always wins. The criticisms contradict one another. The left says Donald Trump always wins, while Trump says he always loses, the one area where he admits it.
Appellate work runs on analogies and process, which makes it a logic-based exercise and a very different thing from politics.
Why can't courts just decide what policy is best?
Article III of the Constitution limits federal courts to actual cases and controversies, which means a party has to show a concrete injury before a judge can act. Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 78 that the judiciary is the least dangerous branch because it controls neither the sword nor the purse and can exercise only judgment. The political question doctrine, laid out in Baker v. Carr in 1962, marks topics that belong to the other branches.
How has the court handled school library book fights?
The main Supreme Court case is Board of Education v. Pico, decided in 1982. A plurality of justices said school officials may not remove library books simply to suppress ideas they dislike, but no single opinion commanded a majority. The court split five to four on the outcome and produced no rule that binds lower courts. Removal disputes have kept reaching lower courts since.
Why does appellate law lean on analogies?
Under the common-law tradition, courts follow earlier decisions, so a new dispute is resolved by asking how closely it resembles cases already decided. Legal scholar Edward Levi described this in his 1949 book An Introduction to Legal Reasoning as reasoning from example to example. A judge's task is to decide which similarities count and which differences matter. Because the earlier rulings are public, the reasoning can be checked step by step.
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