Primer on the Supreme Court

Next week, the Supreme Court will hand down several major decisions.  The newspapers will be full of lengthy articles and opinion pieces.  Television pundits will be fulminating.  All this will be happening because the Supreme Court matters.  Its decisions are important.  And the composition of the Supreme Court -- who holds the nine seats on the Court -- matters. Thus, it's one of many ways in which presidential elections matter: Whoever wins this election will likely have the opportunity to fill at least one seat on the Court and thus affect its ideological and jurisprudential leanings.

See this interesting, brief primer or "users' guide" to the Supreme Court by Dahlia Lithwick, a senior editor at Slate.  Here's a taste of what you'll get:

This week, the Supreme Court will hand down its final opinions for the 2007-08 term, and some of you will be really angry about guns, and some of you will be angry about Guantanamo. But then the justices will take off for Europe (or New Hampshire) and you will take off for the pool (or New Hampshire), and then I fear nobody will think much about the court again until next June.

The composition of the high court is one of the most important issues at stake in the November election. While the justices cannot bring down gas prices or bring home the troops, their decisions in the coming years will affect just about everything else: your rights regarding privacy, reproduction, speech and religion; how to count your vote and where your kids go to school; as well as your occupational and environmental protections. You name it, they'll decide it. Or they'll decide not to decide it (which may be even worse).

It's easy to convince yourself that who sits on that bench is irrelevant to you because the cases are too complicated to comprehend or too remote to affect your life. But the next president may have the chance to appoint as many as three justices—the constitutional equivalent of a royal flush. Herein, a user's guide to the Supreme Court for you to print out and take to the voting booth (or read at the pool).