Minnesota, U.S.A. — Despite all the recent controversy surrounding U.S. Supreme Court decisions on health care, immigration and other issues, nearly two-thirds of Americans can’t name even a single member of the Supreme Court. That’s according to a new national survey by FindLaw.com (www.findlaw.com), the most popular legal information Web site. The survey found that only 34 percent of Americans can name any member of the nation’s highest court.

Chief Justice John Roberts is the most well known of the justices, but could be named by only one in five Americans. Only one percent of Americans can correctly name all nine sitting Justices.

According to the FindLaw survey, the percentage of Americans who can name any U.S. Supreme Court justice are:

• John Roberts – 20%
• Antonin Scalia – 16%
• Clarence Thomas – 16%
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg – 13%
• Sonia Sotomayor – 13%
• Anthony Kennedy – 10%
• Samuel Alito – 5%
• Elena Kagan – 4%
• Stephen Breyer – 3%

“Recent rulings, particularly the decision upholding health care reform, have brought more attention to the U.S. Supreme Court than we’ve seen in past years,” said Stephanie Rahlfs, an attorney and editor at FindLaw.com.

“However, the High Court issues its rulings as a collective body. While justices can and do issue individual concurring and dissenting opinions, court sessions are conducted without TV cameras and deliberations take place behind closed doors. So while the decisions often have significant and lasting impact, the justices themselves are generally not very visible nor well known to the public as individuals.”

The FindLaw.com survey was conducted using a demographically balanced telephone survey of 1,000 American adults and has a margin of error of plus-or-minus three percent.

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The US Supreme Court announced the much awaited and crucial decision on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, upholding it with a 5 to 4 decision.

On the other hand, this action by the Supreme Court junked all anti-Obama care outcries raised by Republicans and protestors, because in some sense the Supreme Court favored the proposal on health care reform. Health care reform has been at the core of the Obama administration since he won the elections in 2008. The Affordable Care Act was passed by Congress in 2010.

The Affordable Care Act, generally known as Obamacare, is a new health policy designed under the Obama Administration with the attempt to provide health insurance to 30 million of the poorest of the poor. There has been great controversy and strong opposition from the Republican party over the Affordable Care Act over the years.

More understandably, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) is a pivotal health reform legislation of the 111th United States Congress. The law requires every individual, if not covered by any employer or state, to maintain minimum essential health coverage.

Check here for a complete look at Obamacare features.

One of the most controversial components of this act is the shared responsibility requirement, generally known as the Individual Mandate, which requires everybody to purchase minimal health insurance coverage if it is not provided by any organization, government, or other institution. Minimum norms for health insurance policies will be established; annual and life time coverage will be abolished.

The Supreme Court provided a cushion to the highly controversial, bitterly opposed Individual Mandate by saying that it does not violate the US Constitution and therefore cannot be refused by states.

James Morone, specializing in Politics and Health Care at Brown University in Rhode Island, said ‘the decision really helps Obama, and the Democrats will ride that hard.’

The decision by the Supreme Court to uphold the Obamacare health reform might act as a principle theme for the presidential election this November, and in one sense it has boosted the morale among the Democrats in their fight for it.

Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney has been a vehement opponent to the so-called Obamacare health reform and said ‘As you might imagine, I disagree with the Supreme Court Decision and I agree with the dissent,’ and he further said, ‘ What the Court did not do on its last day in session I will do on my first day if elected president of the United States. I will act to repeal Obamacare’.

Earlier, it was a battle between what is constitutional and what is not, but now the Court has favored Obamacare, reshaping the entire political clash between Republicans and Democrats.

Obamacare will be a central element of the struggle for authority between the two parties this November; in fact, it might potentially act as a cornerstone in determining the electoral success.

Image Courtesy of Ryan Rodrick Beiler / Shutterstock.com

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On June 25 the United States Supreme Court issued a ruling rejecting most of the Arizona immigration law, known as SB1010. The only part of the law now remaining is the section that allows state and local officials to check the status of people who they have stopped or detained as long as they have “reasonable suspicion” that these individuals are in the country illegally.

One of the parts rejected by the Supreme Court includes making it illegal for illegal immigrants to not have a federal registration card which is already a misdemeanor nationally. SCOTUS also rejected the part of the law that made it illegal for illegals to work, apply for work, or to try to solicit work. SCOTUS also announced that allowing state and local officials to arrest illegals without warrant because they have committed “any public offense that makes the person removable from the United States” is no longer allowed as a part of the law.

Now the law states that officers must check with immigration officials before holding immigrants for reasons other than committing a crime. Arizona law enforcement can notify the federal officials about the suspected illegal status but cannot detain them in jail or charge them for their illegal status. However, while law enforcement cannot hold someone because they are illegal, while the officials are trying to determine the status of an individuals the amount of time they are detained cannot be determined. Kennedy, in the majority opinion, states, “it is not clear at this stage and on this record that the verification process would result in prolonged detention.”

Justice Kennedy delivered the majority opinion. Kennedy stated, “this authority rests, in part, on the National Government’s constitutional power to ‘establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization’ and its inherent power as sovereign to control and conduct relations with foreign nations…the federal power to determine immigration policy is well settled.” Further in the opinion Kennedy elaborates on this aspect of the problematic law: “[this law] would allow the State to achieve its own immigration policy. The result could be unnecessary harassment of some aliens…whom federal officials determine should not be removed. This is not the system Congress created.”

Yet Kennedy acknowledged the problems that Arizona is having stating, “Statistics alone do not capture the full extent of Arizona’s concerns.”

Arizona’s state government claims that it made the law because the federal government has failed to control immigration into the state. Arizona has had to deal with high costs of education and care of immigrants in recent years. The state government believes that this law would empower law enforcement to be able to deal with the immigration problems. Additionally, the law forced the federal government to face the problem of immigration.

However, opponents of the law stated that it criminalized law-abiding people because of their statuses. There was also the worry that the law would lead to racial profiling of legal Hispanics. In his majority decision Kennedy echoed a similar sentiment stating, “discretion in the enforcement of immigration law embraces immediate human concerns. Unauthorized workers trying to support their families, for example, likely pose less danger than alien smugglers or aliens who commit a serious crime. The equities of an individual case may turn on many factors, including whether the alien has children born in the United States, long ties to the community, or a record of distinguished military service.”

Justices Scalia, Alito, and Thomas delivered their own concurring and dissenting opinions. Scalia stated in his opinion, “as a sovereign, Arizona has the inherent power to exclude persons from its territory, subject only to those limitations expressed in the Constitution or constitutionally imposed by Congress.” Thomas supported Scalia and writes, “I agree with Justice Scalia that federal immigration law does not pre-empt any of the challenged provisions of S.B. 1070. I reach that conclusion, however, for the simple reason that there is no conflict between the “ordinary meaning” of the relevant federal laws and that of the four provisions of Arizona law at issue here.”

This decision will highly impact the creation of similar laws in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, and Utah.

After the Arizona law was passed Obama stated that the law, “threatened to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans” and sued the state of Arizona for overstepping its sovereign rights of the federal government. Oral arguments were heard in front of the Supreme Court on April 25, 2012.

Mitt Romney claimed to support the law and would have dropped the lawsuit against Arizona. According to USA Today Romney would then adopt the idea from Arizona of making life so difficult for immigrants that they self-deport.

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Eagan, Minnesota, U.S.A. - Best-selling authors and “textualist” authorities Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner have released their seminal treatise on deriving the meaning of authoritative texts: Reading Law: The Legal Interpretation of Texts, published by Thomson Reuters.

The publication of this book is momentous: it’s the first publication by a Supreme Court Justice in more than 140 years detailing a fully elaborated philosophy of judicial decision making.

Citing and analyzing several hundred judicial decisions, Scalia and Garner guide the reader through what they consider the most important principles of constitutional, statutory, and contractual interpretation. The authors challenge readers to think differently about the law by posing questions that perplex, enlighten, and reveal: Is a corporation entitled to personal privacy? If you trade a gun for drugs, are you “using a gun” in a drug transaction? If it’s illegal to “lay hands on” a priest, is it acceptable to kick him?

“Sometimes important legal questions come in surprising packages,” said Professor Garner. “The question ‘Is a burrito a sandwich?’ for instance, invokes the issue, ‘What would a competent user of the English language say?’ A Massachusetts court decided the question correctly: a burrito is no sandwich.”

Said Justice Scalia: “The goal in posing these unique yet fundamental questions in our new book is to help attorneys better understand how to present a client’s case to the judiciary by better understanding how judges interpret cases. This clarity serves us as citizens and lends a level of transparency to the American legal system that supports the rule of law.”

Scalia and Garner explore many of the most controversial issues in modern jurisprudence, such as: Which is more important, the spirit of the law or the letter of the law? Why is strict construction a bad thing? What is the true doctrine of “originalism”? How old is the doctrine and what are its limits?

Justice Scalia, with 25 years of service on the U.S. Supreme Court, is the foremost expositor of textualism in the world today. Bryan A. Garner, as editor in chief of Black’s Law Dictionary and author of Garner’s Dictionary of Legal Usage, is the most renowned expert on the language of the law. Together they explore the scholarly, substantive, and sublime dimensions of judging with wit and deep insight, reprising the formula they used in their popular 2008 collaboration, Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges.

Image Courtesy of   Mission Geneva

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