In this paper, we give a ‘direct’ construction of the endomorphism ring of supersingular elliptic curves over a prime field Fp from ‘ideal classes’ of Q( √−p). We use the result to prove that the result of Kaneko on ‘minimal’ CM liftings of such supersingular elliptic curves is a best possible result. We also prove that the result of Elkies on ‘minimal’ CM liftings of all supersingular elliptic...