I agree, this is civics, as long as we keep it from straying into a debate about specific political issues.
Jennifer: your comment re judges not being there to interpret the law.
Nobody who has ever gone to law school would agree with this statement. In fact, if your statement were true and the law could be enforced without interpretation there would be no need for law school.
You’re just going to have to trust me on this. Laws have to be interpreted because it is impossible to write laws that expressly address every conceivable situation. Further, the ONLY issues that end up in court are ones where there are arguments to be made for different interpretations of the law. When the law is clear, people settle quickly because there’s no point spending thousands of dollars to litigate an issue where the outcome is already clear.
As soon as you try to apply the law to any situation, you are interpreting it. Sometimes the interpretation is obvious, but often it is not and that’s when you end up in court.
2ndly, in terms of legislating from the bench: if you want your constitution to have any strength, you have to give judges the power to enforce it. That means they have to have the power to strike down unconstitutional laws, and to do that of course they have to interpret what the constitution says.
This does mean that judges will have a lot of power. It may be that you prefer they didn’t, that this check on government should be eliminated. It is a check on both liberal and conservative administrations, but unfortunately because your appointment process is so political you end up with Supreme Court judges who have strong ideological commitments. The result is that the US Supreme Court does often end up interpreting the law according to political ideology rather than according to the best legal reasoning.
The Canadian Supreme Court is appointed in a much less political way (though our current Conservative government has started to politicize the appointment process) and the fortunate result is that I think it makes better legal decisions. If the government does not like the results, they can change the constitution and thus change the law that the judges have to apply.