David Letterman highlights ten things you didn’t know about the Court. Update: The Daily Beast chimes in with 11 real facts you probably didn’t know about the Court.

For the last quarter century, the American public’s approval of the Supreme Court has been consistently high and generally more stable than approval ratings of the other branches of the Federal government. However, a Pew Research survey has detected a steady decline in the Court’s favorability that cuts across political party lines.

Did you know you can listen to oral arguments and opinion announcements through podcasts on your iPod or iPhone? Oyez has recently redesigned and improved our iTunes U site. Check it out to see what podcasts are available.

John Paul Stevens’ tenure as an associate justice of the Supreme Court lasted 34 years, 6 months, and 11 days, the capstone of a career that included time as a law clerk to Supreme Court justice Wiley Rutledge, judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and private attorney. Throughout his lifetime … Continue reading Review: Five Chiefs by John Paul Stevens →

The New York Times published an editorial today in support of a proposal last week from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. The proposal advocates–and the editorial endorses–a presumption for openness regarding the Court’s records. Beyond its paper records, the Court continues to shield itself from public access, restricting its public sessions to … Continue reading An Open Court? →

Professor Geoffrey Stone of the University of Chicago Law School lays out a detailed argument with the following objective: “The conservative constitutional narrative is deeply unprincipled and patently wrong, both in its defense of conservative judicial ideology and in its attack on what conservatives deride as a result-oriented “liberal” jurisprudence. In fact, most of the … Continue reading Liberals attack core conservative principles →

A group of House Democrats are pushing for tougher ethics standards for Supreme Court justices. They want to hold the justices to the same high standards that apply to all other federal judges. It seems obvious that this proposal is a non-starter in the Republican-controlled House. But it does draw attention to the different standards … Continue reading Get tough with SCOTUS ethics, say House Dems →

Justice Clarence Thomas is co-teaching a constitutional law seminar at George Washington University Law School this semester. Thomas has partnered with Professor Gregory Maggs, who clerked for Thomas in the 1991 Term, Thomas’s first year on the bench. Read the full story here.