Legal Commentary

The Kagan confirmation hearings begin Monday morning.  C-SPAN conducted a poll this week to assess popular opinion.  What is public awareness of the hearings and the nominee? What is the Court's approval rating?

A few highlights of the results and a link to the poll after the break.

The following is quoted from the press release:

The survey of 1,512 self-identified voters, conducted for C-SPAN on June 18, 2010 by Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates, LLC, shows far less awareness of Ms. Kagan?s nomination to the Supreme Court than the awareness of Sonia Sotomayor?s nomination a year ago. Only 19% correctly named Ms. Kagan as the nominee, while 43% were able to correctly name Ms. Sotomayor in a July 2009 C-SPAN poll. Thirty-eight percent support the Kagan nomination, 30% are unsupportive, and a third has no opinion about the nomination.

Asked about basic qualifications for Court appointees, nearly two in three (64%) respondents say the gender of a Supreme Court nominee is not important. But when asked about a nominee?s law school education, essentially the same number (63%) would prefer the next Supreme Court justice come from a ?different background,? other than the Ivy League Law schools of Yale, Harvard and Columbia which produced the eight incumbent justices and the current nominee.

The poll also shows that nearly half of participants (48%) believe the Supreme Court is the branch of the U.S. government that best serves the public?s interest, but only 29% say the Court is doing a good or excellent job (and, 12% say the Court is doing a poor job).

Complete results of this survey can be found as C-SPAN's website at this link:

http://www.c-span.org/pdf/2010SCOTUS_poll.pdf