Orin Kerr brings my attention to a survey that shows that most Americans don’t know the names of any members of the Supreme Court. Of the 35% who could name one or more, Sandra Day O‘Connor and Clarence Thomas are the most well-known. Here’s the money quote from the press release:

“The results of the survey are disappointing, but not surprising,” said Professor Stephen Presser of Northwestern University School of Law. “I suspect that the American public generally believes that it doesn’t really matter much who serves on the Supreme Court, because they believe the Court is objectively applying the Constitution and laws when it makes a decision.

“The truth of the matter is,” said Presser, “it makes an enormous amount of difference who serves on the Court. Our political parties are very much divided over whether judges should passively follow the law or legislate from the bench, with President Bush committed to appointing judges who will promise not to legislate from the bench, and Senate Democrats committed to opposing his nominees. This is an issue that ought to be of great concern to the public, but really hasn’t attracted much attention.”

Let me get this straight. You’ve got the money to do a good probability sample of the U.S. population, and you ask them a trivia question. How about finding out empirically whether or not the “American public generally believes that it doesn’t really matter much who serves on the Supreme Court”—that seems like a pretty important public policy question, no? How about telling me if there are any systematic variations in who knows which members of the Court—do blacks disproportionately know Clarence Thomas is? Do women know the female members at a higher rate? Do they know anything about particular cases? Do they know some important precedents, even in impressionistic terms? (I suspect more people know they have the “right to remain silent” than the fact the warning was established in Miranda v. Arizona. But both show some familiarity with the work of the Court.)

Ah well, at least the law professor concedes the validity of the attitudinal model. It turns out that the entire judicial behavior field isn’t excreting into a headwind after all…

I think that Jeff Licquia has hit the nail on the head about the “whiteness studies” story that’s been going around the web the last couple of days. No excerpts, go RTWT™.

Via Quare, I learn that the Federal Reserve may be planning to produce new $2 bills for the first time since 1996. For some odd reason, Ann Arbor (Mich.) seems to be awash in the bills. Like the dollar coin, they’re one of the useful things that seem to have dropped through the cracks.