One of the classes I teach annually is a Judicial Process course in which we spend time discussing the Supreme Court. It is often hard to get students to move beyond seeing the justices as nine old men who need to retire…. before they are just “too old.” Despite the legitimacy of arguing mandatory retirement dates and the aforementioned inaccurate reflections of the Court’s demographics, this discussion often demonstrates students’ lack of awareness and connection with the Court. Numerous studies have demonstrated that citizens are least aware of the judicial branch—how can we forget that famous survey that “discovered” more Americans could name the various members of the Three Stooges than could identify members of the seated Supreme Court.

This fall, C-SPAN decided to address this issue. Not only did they run a number of specials  on the history and currency of the Court last October, but C-SPAN made it all available for us on the web. Home base is their website, http://supremecourt.c-span.org/, which includes the full documentary on the Court, full and brief interviews with the current justices, a tour of the Supreme Court, an interactive timeline on the Court, and biographies and interviews with current scholars of the federal courts. Students in both upper-division courses, as well as in U.S. Government, would benefit from these resources.

Because the interviews with the members of the Court are so well-edited and organized, a lecture or reading on the role of oral arguments on the Supreme Court can be easily punctuated with a seven-minute documentary containing current justices and Supreme Court reporters discussing the process and purpose of oral arguments. See http://supremecourt.c-span.org/Video/JusticeOwnWords/SC_Jus_OralArgument.aspx.

Other available topics included: new justices on the Court, issuing opinions, the Justices’ conference, the role of the Chief Justice, and granting certiorari. Because this video was filmed during the fall of 2009, the interviews include the newest member of the Court, Justice Sotomayor, as well as the recently retired Justice O’Connor. Advanced students who have taken constitutional law find it exciting to put faces to the individuals they have been studying and to hear the philosophy they have observed in the opinions directly articulated by the justices.

Many thanks to Lynne Bernier and Jason Badura at Carroll University for sending the intrepid Mary Augustine a link that provides, well, a ton of links related to globalization compiled by the Levin Institute at the State University of New York. The page includes this disclaimer:

We have compiled these links from our own review of the vast amount of information available on the Internet to enable you to find the most relevant sources for your research. We do not, however, endorse the viewpoints of any of the groups to which we link, and we cannot guarantee the accuracy of the information posted on these sites. Rather, we hope to provide you with a broad range of opinions and perspectives, many of them contradictory and critical of each other, which shows that globalization is a highly controversial and contested area of study and action.

The overall host site for this links page, Globalization101.org, includes issue briefs and news analyses, as well.

This week, the world is celebrating International Women’s Day – an opportune occasion to think about the status of women in politics in a comparative context. For example, do your students know that the U.S. ranks 74^th (tied with Turkmenistan) in terms of the share of women in the lower house of the national parliament, i.e. the House of Representatives? Both countries have 16.8% women in their lower houses. Interestingly, the country ranked first with 56.3% women in the lower house of parliament is Rwanda. While it might not be surprising that Sweden, Norway, and Iceland – countries known for their commitment to social equality – outrank the U.S., the fact that countries such as Costa Rica, Spain, or Nepal boast a higher share of women in their respective legislatures might be less familiar to students.

These comparative data, and a host of additional valuable information, are made available by the Interparliamentary Union, which also hosts a searchable database of information about national parliaments, an archive of election results, and academic articles.

Are your students puzzled by these findings? Perhaps this report by the European Commission, which mentions quotas as one way to boost increased equality in gender representation, will provide some ideas to start a discussion, or perhaps serve as the basis of a short research assignment.

Interested in testing your students’ knowledge of U.S. history and government, if only to get them interested in improving their scores? James T. Owens at Oakton Community College recommended this online quiz by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute to our Custom Media Consultant, Mary Augustine. The ISI quiz mixes questions about U.S. history and founding documents with questions that emphasize free market principles. ISI, a conservative non-profit, describes its mission as nurturing:

…our nation’s founding principles—limited government, individual liberty, private property, a free market economy, personal responsibility, and ethical standards.

Other sites offer online, graded quizzes that make use of questions from the U.S. Citizenship Test. This one includes a few difficult questions related to U.S. history. And here’s another in a similar vein.

The Pew Research Center, in the meantime, now has an entire page listing a host of interactive features, including quizzes to test your News IQ, Global IQ, and Political Typology.