Scholars have devoted considerable attention to the U.S. Supreme Court's legitimacy-conferring capacity, arguing that the Court attaches some of its legitimacy to its rulings, leading people to accept those decisions. Missing from earlier research is recognition that the U.S. is a federal legal...

Conventional political science wisdom holds that contemporary American politics is characterized by deep and profound partisan and ideological divisions. Unanswered is the question of whether those divisions have spilled over into threats to the legitimacy of the United States Supreme Court....

Social science knowledge about public attitudes toward the United States Supreme Court has accumulated over the last few decades to the point that a number of sound empirical propositions have emerged. This article reviews those findings and provides new data from a 2011 nationally...