Monday, October 4, 2010

Our Right-Wing Supreme Court

Orin Kerr at Volokh Conspiracy observes that the media has discovered that the Roberts' Court is staunchly right-wing but, he points out, the public thinks the Court is pretty liberal. What accounts for this disparity? Here is Kerr,

How to reconcile the press coverage with the poll results? To my mind, the most likely explanation is that there is a difference between the direction of the law on the left-right spectrum and its present location on that spectrum.

Sure. Or it could be that the vast majority of Americans have no idea how many members sit on the Court, much less what arcane issues they decide and where those decisions lie on some ideological spectrum, and so they react to decades worth of right-wing propoganda on the Court.

Or Kerr could be right and Americans could be making measured and learned decisions about the relative ideological space the Court holds. You know, just like their measured and learned decision that Obama is in fact a Muslim.

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