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Children's Images of the Supreme Court: A Preliminary Mapping

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 September 2024

Greg A. Caldeira
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Abstract

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Social scientists have offered numerous explanations for the support the public accords to the United States Supreme Court. Easton and Dennis have advanced the contention that such support is at least in part the product of youthful idealization of the Court, and this hypothesis has gained widespread, if tacit, acceptance. This paper argues that their conclusion is largely the consequence of a methodological artifact (the use of fixed-response survey instruments), and offers evidence that most children are not only unaware of the Supreme Court and its functions but demonstrate little or no positive affect toward that institution. If this is so, then why has the Easton-Dennis explanation persisted, despite its implausibility and lack of empirical grounding? One possibility is that the notion of a reservoir of trust in the Supreme Court is a useful rhetorical weapon for both judicial activists and those who advocate judicial restraint. But if public perceptions and evaluations of the Court are not strongly held, we must face the danger that those views will be susceptible to manipulation by people who do know and care about it—political, social, and economic elites.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 11 , Issue 5 , Summer 1977 , pp. 851 - 871
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

For providing me with their data, I am grateful to Fred I. Greenstein, Princeton University, and Sidney G. Tarrow, Cornell University. During the course of writing this paper, I have incurred considerable intellectual debts to Fred I. Greenstein, Walter F. Murphy, and Barbara Young, all of Princeton University. For their helpful comments and criticisms, I am grateful to Richard L. Abel and Austin Sarat. None of these persons bears any responsibility for the final product.

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