What Would We Be Without Wishful Thinking?

8% of the American public believes that the late Thurgood Marshall is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. (What percentage of Americans think Earl Warren was a sleazy male stripper remains unspecified.) Perhaps more importantly, fewer than 30% of the public got the question right.

With all due respect to Justice Ginsburg, it’s this kind of data that makes clear that the idea that, for example, Roe would have found greater public acceptance if the Court had waited to decide it on equal protection grounds is absurd. An electorate that for the most part doesn’t even know who sits on the Supreme Court isn’t going to base its evaluation of judicial opinions on careful evaluations of judicial craftsmanship, and Roe is actually an excellent illustration of this.