Why you should be suspicious of "people on the street were more ignorant of X than Y" stories

[mmcirvin]

I missed this in March: Mark Liberman of Language Log takes apart the "more people could name the Simpsons than First Amendment freedoms" story.

The people who could correctly name N First Amendment freedoms (I assume they didn't split freedom of religion into the establishment and free-exercise clauses) decreased monotonically with increasing N, whereas the Simpsons distribution was bimodal, with more people ignorant of even one Simpson than of one First Amendment freedom, but also a fairly large population who could name all of them. From these numbers it is possible to extract just about any message you want, especially if people repeating the story are inclined to garble the result in the desired direction.

Comments

rounding out the thread

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Hunh. So I was wondering which was which myself (though I recall that the 4th is the search-and-seizure amendment, and of course you probably recall the contents of the 2nd amendment as another famously controversial one), and so I searched for a copy of the Bill of Rights (http://usinfo.state.gov/usa/infousa/facts/funddocs/billeng.htm).

I hadn't realized that the right of a jury trial was spread over two amendments-- 6 covers the right in the case of criminal prosecution, and includes the right of a speedy and public trial, impartial jury, confronting one's accusers, etc. 7 covers civil law, which creates a right to jury trials for matters where $20 or more is at stake.

3 is the quartering of soldiers. 4, as I mentioned is about reasonable searches and the causes for warrants. 8 is about bail. 9 is "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." which seems like something one can take for granted these days, and 10 about the powers not delegated in the constitution to the Feds or the States belong to the states or the people, respectively.

Re: rounding out the thread

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Somewhere recently (was it Rone's journal?) I was reading a thread about that twenty-dollar minimum on civil suits, and a bunch of lawyers pointed out that in practice it never comes up today; there are various statutes that effectively set a higher bar than that. The reasoning by which they are considered constitutional is somewhat above my head (though I suppose it's fortunate they are; $20 in 1789 was a lot of money, but not so much today).