Public opinion of the court is strongly polarized along partisan lines. At the time of publication, an average of 38 percent of Americans approved of the job the Supreme Court is doing while 54 percent disapproved, for an average net approval rating of -16 percentage points. Some of the major cases the court will take […]
The U.S. Supreme Court issued a remarkable number of unanimous decisions last term, and in their public remarks the justices seemed unanimous in saying that unanimity was a good thing. But is it? Michael F. Salamone, a political scientist at WSU, has designed experiments to test whether the public is more apt to accept unanimous […]
In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial Hobby Lobby decision, Carolyn Long, associate professor of the School of Politics, Philosophy and Public Affairs at WSU Vancouver, explained the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), the basis of the court’s ruling. RFRA was adopted after a 1990 Supreme Court decision denied unemployment benefits to […]