C-SPAN Tests Public's Supreme Court IQ
- Details
- Published on Friday, 10 July 2009
- Written by Molly McDonough, ABA Journal
C-SPAN yesterday released results of a poll aimed at determining what Americans know about the highest court in the land.
Not surprisingly, while many of those polled couldn't come up with Sonia Sotomayor as the name of President Obama's U.S. Supreme Court pick, two-thirds of poll respondents knew she could be the first Latina on the high court.
C-SPAN also found that Americans are hungry for more information about the high court because they know how important a role it plays, according to a release about the poll (PDF).
"These are very considerable high awareness numbers. The high awareness is there because people are hungry for more information about the Supreme Court, in some larger sense," pollster Rob Green said today on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal". "People realize on some level how important every nomination is and how important the Court is in their lives."
Bolstering the notion that Americans want more, not less Supreme Court info, 61 percent of those polled said it's time for the high court to open oral arguments to TV coverage.
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