In modern law, certiorari is recognized in many jurisdictions, including England and Wales (now called a "quashing order"), Canada, India, Ireland, the Philippines and the United States.
Certiorari is the present passive infinitive of the Latin verb certioro, certiorare ("to inform, apprise, show").
[8] In English common law, certiorari was a supervisory writ, serving to keep "all inferior jurisdictions within the bounds of their authority ... [protecting] the liberty of the subject, by speedy and summary interposition".
The underlying policy is that all inferior courts and authorities have only limited jurisdiction or powers and must be kept within their legal bounds.
The latter type of error can only be challenged through an appeal, once the court makes a final decision in the case.
The Supreme Court declined to decide whether certiorari would be available to address a legal error that threatens irreparable harm to a party's rights that could not be cured on appeal.
[21] The common law jurisdiction to issue certiorari was modified by statute in 1972, when the New Zealand Parliament passed the Judicature Amendment Act.
This Act created a new procedural mechanism, known as an "application for review", which could be used in place of certiorari and the other prerogative writs.
[23][24] As Associate Justice James Wilson (1742–1798), the person primarily responsible for the drafting of Article Three of the United States Constitution, which describes the judicial branch of the US federal government,[25] wrote: In every judicial department, well arranged and well organized, there should be a regular, progressive, gradation of jurisdiction; and one supreme tribunal should superintend and govern all the others.
[28] That is, the Court had to review all properly presented appeals on the merits, hear oral argument, and issue decisions.
As the United States expanded in the nineteenth century, the federal judicial system became increasingly strained, and the Supreme Court had a backlog of cases several years long.
Granting a writ of certiorari means merely that at least four of the justices have determined that the circumstances described in the petition are sufficient to warrant review by the Court.
As the Court explained in Missouri v. Jenkins,[37] such a denial "imports no expression of opinion upon the merits of the case".
The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania uniquely uses the terms allocatur (informally) and "allowance of appeal" (formally) for the same process.
Virginia has an intermediate appeals court, but operates under discretionary review except in family law and administrative cases.
In March 1927, the Texas Legislature enacted a law directing the Texas Supreme Court to summarily refuse to hear applications for writs of error when it believed the Court of Appeals opinion correctly stated the law.
[41] In contrast, California,[42] Florida,[43] and New York[44] solved the problem of creating uniform precedent by simply holding that the first intermediate appellate court to reach a novel question of law always sets binding precedent for the entire state, unless and until another intermediate appellate court expressly disagrees with the first one.