Discretionary jurisdiction is a power that allows a court to engage in discretionary review. This power gives a court the authority to decide whether to hear a particular case brought before it. Typically, courts of last resort and intermediate courts in a state or country will have discretionary jurisdiction. In contrast, the lower courts have no such power. For this reason, the lower courts must entertain any case properly filed, so long as the court has subject matter jurisdiction over the questions of law and in personam jurisdiction over the parties to the case. Customarily a court is granted the power by rule, statute, or constitutional provision. When a constitutional provision establishes the court's power, it will have more limitations on its screening process. The usual intent behind granting power through a constitutional provision is to maintain decisional uniformity. Moreover, discretionary jurisdiction is reactive rather than proactive. In other words, appellate courts do not search for cases review. Rather the court's exercise of discretion is in response to a petitioner's appeal of a lower court's decision or in a motion for rehearing made to the intermediate [appellate] court. Moreover, the highest [supreme] court's exercise of discretion is similar to the intermediate court, except that a supreme court will grant review at a much smaller percentage. For example, the United States Supreme Court merely grants review for five percent of its requests for discretionary review.
United States
Generally, there are three tiers of court at the state and federal levels in the United States: trial, intermediate (appellate) court, and court of last resort (supreme court).
This structure creates a two-tier appellate system. The system affords a litigant one appeal as a matter of right after trial. The state's or district's intermediate court will review the first appeal, and after the intermediate court renders a decision, the supreme court will conduct any further review.
The "error correction" function allows the appellate court to examine the record to determine whether the lower court applied existing law correctly according to the law and applicable procedure. However, oftentimes a litigant will appeal, asserting that while the parties agree on the applicable law, they believe the trial court incorrectly interpreted the existing law or incorrectly applied the existing law to the facts.
An appellate court with discretionary jurisdiction can delegate error correction to lower courts while it focuses its limited resources on properly developing case law.