How long does the Supreme Court have to decide on a petition for certiorari?

Question

I'm curious if any rule or custom imposes a time limit. Does the petition "expire" if they never do anything with it?

Answer 1

There is probably an internal court rule that defines an expiration date.

But generally, as a matter of custom, the court accepts or denies cert during the same term.

Answer 2

About 7500 writs are presented and only about 80-150(see below) are accepted, so I don't think there is a time limit. They can either accept or deny.

In the United States, certiorari is the writ that an appellate court issues to a lower court in order to review its judgment for legal error, where no appeal is available as a matter of right. Since the Judiciary Act of 1925, most cases cannot be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court as a matter of right; therefore, a party who wants that court to review a decision of a federal or state court files a "petition for writ of certiorari" in the Supreme Court. If the court grants the petition, the case is scheduled for briefing and argument.

Four of the nine justices must vote to grant a writ of certiorari. This is called the "rule of four". The great majority of cases brought to the Supreme Court are denied certiorari (approximately 7500 petitions are presented each year; between 80 and 150 are granted), because the Supreme Court is generally careful to choose only cases in which it has jurisdiction and which it considers sufficiently important to merit the use of its limited resources.

Merely granting a writ does not necessarily mean the Supreme Court has found anything wrong with the decision of the lower court, merely that it wants to look at it for some reason. Conversely, the legal effect of the Supreme Court's denial of a petition for a writ of certiorari is commonly misunderstood as meaning that the Supreme Court approves the decision of a lower court. However, such a denial "imports no expression of opinion upon the merits of the case, as the bar has been told many times.

Certiorari is sometimes informally referred to as cert, and cases warranting the Supreme Court's attention as certworthy. One situation where the Supreme Court sometimes grants certiorari is when the federal appeals courts in two (or more) federal judicial circuits have ruled different ways in similar situations, and the Supreme Court wants to resolve that "circuit split" about how the law is supposed to apply to that kind of situation.