There are some events that bookies won't accept wagers on, because the outcome is considered all but certain.

In legal circles, the biggest "off the board" bet going is whether the Supreme Court this term will decide the constitutionality of the NSA’s bulk telephone metadata program, and resolve the issue once and for all. Virtually every expert agrees that won't happen.

But don't tell that to conservative activist lawyer Larry Klayman, who last December won the first major courtroom victory against the NSA's program. Klayman sued to stop the program, and U.S. District Judge Richard Leon of Washington, D.C. ruled it likely unconstitutional. The judge called the spying "almost Orwellian," and ordered the program shut down – but also stayed his order pending resolution in the appellate courts.

The government appealed that decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which most likely wouldn't issue a decision for around a year. But this week Klayman upped the ante and filed a petition with the Supreme Court asking it to immediately snatch up the case, bypassing the appeals level altogether. It's a long-shot, but if the justices accept his petition, they would issue a decision by this summer and resolve the legal flap once and for all.

"This case is of such imperative public importance that it justifies deviation from normal appellate practice and requires immediate consideration and determination in the Supreme Court," Klayman wrote (.pdf) the justices.

There are a number of legal and political issues that make it unlikely that the Supreme Court will acquiesce. But there is historic precedent for the court taking an important case despite it not being "ripe for review," a legal term generally meaning the litigation surrounding an issue hasn’t been exhausted in the lower courts.

In fact, the issues at stake in past instances where the high court plucked a case from the appellate courts pale in significance against the government's mass collection of metadata from every phone call originating and terminating in the United States.

The cases concerned the price creditors should receive from a failing railroad, the blocking of a post-World War II coal strike, preventing the eviction of a tenant from his rental and whether the U.S. Sentencing Commission is an unlawful congressional delegation of power.

Among the last times the high court decided a case still in the appellate courts, the dispute involved a cocaine dealer’s claim that the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which set sentencing ranges for federal criminal defendants, was unconstitutional because Congress gave it too much power.

Justice Harry Blackmun in 1989 said the court entertained petitions from both the coke defendant and the government because of the "imperative public importance" of the case. This is how Blackmun fashioned it:

"Petitioner argues that in delegating the power to promulgate sentencing guidelines for every federal criminal offense to an independent Sentencing Commission, Congress has granted the Commission excessive legislative discretion in violation of the constitutionally based nondelegation doctrine. We do not agree."

Part of Blackmun’s reasoning was based on 1943 Supreme Court precedent upholding the Federal Communication Commission’s powers, granted by Congress, to regulate broadcast licensing.

Justice Antonin Scalia dissented "because I can find no place within our constitutional system for an agency created by Congress to exercise no governmental power other than the making of laws."

Nearly two decades before in 1970, the justices decided an issue, which was at various lower courts, concerning the merger of the Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads, the nation’s largest rail merger at the time that had won approval by the Interstate Commerce Commission.

The dispute centered on another rail concern, New Haven Railroad, which was failing and had threatened to stop commuter rail service in New England and the surrounding areas. As a condition of the merger between Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads, the government demanded that a merged railroad also include New Haven.

It was valued at $125 million by the government. Saying the value was too low, banks and debt holders immediately sued in litigation that ping-ponged around the country. In the end, the price was essentially increased by $28 million in a 98-page majority opinion.

Another case involved the War Labor Disputes Act in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The act granted the government authority to operate the nation’s coal mines as the United Mine Workers were threatening a strike.

The high court intervened, and upheld a federal judge who restrained the union from participating in a nationwide strike in 1947.

The year before, the justices again heard a case before it was ripe, this one concerning the eviction of a tenant in Ohio’s Columbus Defense Rental Area. The dispute centered on who had the authority to enforce the Emergency Price Control Act of 1942, which President Franklin D. Roosevelt said was an "important weapon in our armory against the onslaught of the Axis powers."

In short, the act established rent control and prohibited "related speculative and manipulative practices."

The issue boiled down to a tenant who was evicted after the sale of the Ohio property he was renting. The state ordered him out and it was unclear whether a federal judge could block an eviction ordered by a state. Ultimately, the high court in 1946 said federal courts could enforce the act, and overrule state courts who have ordered evictions. The flap had not been litigated in the appellate court.

That all said, the justices might rather leave the issue with Congress instead of weighing in now, despite their own precedents authorizing early intervention.

Shortly after Leon's ruling that America’s founding fathers would be "aghast" at the NSA’s bulk telephone metadata spying, a federal judge in New York went the opposite way. U.S. district Judge William Pauley ruled that the phone spying was a reasonable "vital tool" to combat terrorism and is less intrusive than the data people "voluntarily surrender" to "trans-national corporations."

That suit, which is also on appeal, was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Supreme Court might prefer to wait until both cases have been heard at the appellate level.

In the meantime, Obama has proposed legislative changes to the program. And in June of 2015, a piece of the Patriot Act known as Section 215 that has been authorizing the surveillance is up for renewal.

The act, adopted in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks, allows the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to authorize broad warrants for most any type of "tangible" records, including those held by banks, doctors and phone companies. The law has been secretly applied to the bulk telephone metadata program, according to a once-secret interpretation of the law that has been divulged in the wake of the Snowden leaks.

The act’s original author said, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), claims the President Barack Obama administration’s interpretation of the law to allow the bulk collection of metadata is a "dangerous" one.

The Republican told Deputy Attorney General James Cole during a House Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday that, "Unless Section 215 gets fixed, you, Mr. Cole, and the intelligence community will get absolutely nothing, because I am confident there are not the votes in this Congress to reauthorize it," he said.

It's possible the Supreme Court eventually will hear one of the NSA lawsuits. But it most likely won't happen until at least next year, not in the coming weeks or months. The justices have given the government until March 7 to respond to Klayman's petition.

Thomas Goldstein, who has litigated about 10 percent of the Supreme Court’s cases the past 15 years, tells WIRED he's put the chances of Klayman's petition being granted at "0.00000000 percent."

Orin Kerr, a Fourth Amendment expert and former Justice Department official who now teaches at George Washington University Law School, agrees it’s virtually a slam dunk the justices will reject Klayman's pending petition.

"It's very, very unlikely," Kerr said in an e-mail, "that the Supreme Court would take this case now. "