Supreme Court of Hawaii

The Supreme Court of Hawaii is the highest court of the State of Hawaii in the United States, and its decisions bind all other courts of the Hawaii State Judiciary. Its main purpose is to review trial court decisions in which appeals have been granted, which it decides from written records and sometimes oral argument in the main chamber, without taking evidence of its own. It meets in Aliʻiōlani Hale in Honolulu. It also has original jurisdiction to answer questions of law passed to it from trial courts or the federal court, to hear civil cases submitted on agreed facts, and to decide writ proceedings such as mandamus, prohibition and habeas corpus. Five justices sit on it, initially appointed for ten years by the Governor from a list of four to six candidates supplied by the Hawaii Judicial Selection Commission and confirmed by the state Senate, and all must retire at seventy. Its reported case law reaches back to January 1847 in the Hawaiian Kingdom, which adopted Anglo-American common law voluntarily under Kamehameha III.