Most Americans know about the Supreme Court, and many are aware of the circuit court of appeals in Washington, often labeled the second highest court in the land. But outside of lawyers, journalists and the odd legal aficionado, few are familiar with the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Yet the New Orleans-based court has been the driving force behind many of the big issues the Supreme Court has confronted over the last five years.

The case that overturned Roe v. Wade and upended 50 years of abortion politics came from the 5th Circuit. So have the big challenges to President Biden’s immigration policies. Challenges to the legality of the chemical abortion pill and a major gun control law have also risen from the 5th Circuit to land in the Supreme Court’s lap.

In each case the 5th Circuit judges plowed new constitutional ground, forcing the Supreme Court to tackle issues some of the justices would prefer to let alone.

Still bubbling up from the circuit’s judges are a case on Texas’ floating border wall in the Rio Grande and a case ordering the White House and the FBI to stop colluding with social media companies to censor Americans’ viewpoints.

“The 5th Circuit, whether you love it or hate it, is providing a service to the nation,” said Curt Levey, president of the Committee for Justice. “These are all important issues the [Supreme] Court should hear.”

There are plenty of people who do seem to hate the 5th Circuit, which encompasses Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi. Immigrant rights advocates, in particular, have blasted the court for “cruel” rulings on border security. The left-wing web outlet Vox said the court was full of “judicial arsonists.”

One key case came before the justices Tuesday in a challenge to how Congress set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a Wall Street regulator set up in the wake of the 2008 recession.

Conservatives have long complained that the CFPB has too little political accountability, stemming from the agency’s ability to set its own budget outside of the annual appropriations process on Capitol Hill.

The 5th Circuit agreed with those complaints, ruling the funding scheme unconstitutional.

But most of the Supreme Court’s justices were skeptical during oral arguments, suggesting Congress has wide latitude to decide how to fund agencies and that includes giving them significant leeway to spend what they need.

“Standing appropriations aren’t per se unconstitutional,” said Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee.

The federal judiciary has a three-tiered, pyramidal structure. The district courts, also known as the trial courts, are where 677 active judges and dozens more senior judges hear tens of thousands of cases each year. As the name suggests, this is where trials are held to explore the evidence in criminal and civil matters.

The Supreme Court sits at the top of the pyramid, with the nine justices hearing fewer than a hundred cases a year.

In between are the 13 circuit courts of appeals, where 179 active judges and dozens more senior judges hear every appeal from district courts. Unlike the Supreme Court, they don’t have the luxury of picking cases. They don’t hold trials, but instead rule on whether district courts botched the facts or wrongly applied the law.

Because the Supreme Court doesn’t take every appeal, most of the heavy legal lifting is done in the circuit courts.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in California, often gets attention as the country’s most liberal, issuing rulings that the high court has often slapped down.

But for sheer force of judicial willpower, the 5th Circuit is the premier court in the land, forcing the justices to confront the big issues of the day.

Legal analysts said that’s partly because of the makeup of the court.

Of its 16 active judges, four were appointed by Democratic presidents, including one by President Biden. By contrast, there are six Trump appointees, four George W. Bush appointees and even two Reagan appointees still sitting.

Add in the eight senior judges, who help with some cases, and the ratio is even more skewed toward GOP appointees.

The structure of lower courts in the 5th Circuit, particularly in Texas, allows plaintiffs to “judge-shop” — search for a court to file a lawsuit knowing they have a good chance of ending up with a particular judge.

Conservatives have made good use of that, said Elliot Mincberg, senior fellow at People For the American Way, a liberal advocacy group.

“You can effectively almost guarantee what judge you’ll get depending on where you file,” Mr. Mincberg said.

He said the circuit is “dominated by far-right Trump-appointed judges” who are further to the right than the Supreme Court.

“Their decisions, many of them, effectively have nationwide impact,” Mr. Mincberg said.

Adam Feldman, Supreme Court scholar and creator of the EpmiricalSCOTUS blog, said the 5th Circuit has some of the “most well-known conservative appeals court judges” and the high court could be taking signals from them and how they frame the issues, like abortion last year.

“There were several abortion petitions out there but the [5th Circuit] judges spotlit the abortion issue for the justices in their decision. The way that [the 5th Circuit] judges frame the issues might also help the justices see why such cases are important, especially as the judges bring constitutional elements into cases which naturally lend well to [Supreme Court] review,” Mr. Feldman said.

He also noted that most of the 5th Circuit cases reviewed by the Supreme Court were overturned in the last term.

Among those reversals were a decision siding with states who challenged the preference for American Indian families in adoption of American Indian children and another decision ruling that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was breaking immigration law by ordering his department not to target most illegal immigrants for arrest and deportation.

Overall, seven of the nine decisions reviewed by the Supreme Court that arose from the 5th Circuit were reversed in the 2022 term. In the term before that, the reversal rate was also seven out of nine.

By comparison, the 9th Circuit was reversed 22 times out of 25 cases in the 2021-2022 terms.

Among the 5th Circuit cases at the high court this term is a gun-rights case in which the appeals court ruled a key part of federal gun control law is unconstitutional.

A 2021 Supreme Court decision reaffirmed the personal right to bear arms and created a history-based test for what kinds of gun restrictions can survive constitutional scrutiny. The 5th Circuit, relying on that ruling, said it invalidates the federal prohibition on gun possession by persons under a court domestic violation restraining order.

The circuit court judges said the situation would have been different if the person had been convicted of a violent crime, but a civil restraining order doesn’t preclude someone from the constitutional right to bear arms.

The Biden administration has also asked the justices to intervene in another 5th Circuit case involving the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, the chemical abortion pill.

The Supreme Court has not acted on that appeal, but the justices have stayed lower court rulings while the case develops.

• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.

• Alex Swoyer can be reached at aswoyer@washingtontimes.com.