Leaving the political opinions aside (especially since I don't vote in the USA), I believe that USA has one strong/clean/independent Justice system. There is transparency. I don't believe that in many other modern/western countries there is so much attention to the top judges.

I understand that people don't like either "Barack", or "Donald", and others before them, especially calling them by their first name as if they are friends or cousins. But just for fun, let's see if anyone from Belgium, UK, Greece, Spain, etc can name 5 top judges. I, for one, cannot :)

Sidenote: I'm not a US citizen, nor live in the USA.

If the chief executive of a water company or an electricity company became a household name, my first assumption would be that there was some kind of scandal. Infrastructure is supposed to be boring.

Britain has a supreme court, but I couldn't name any of the judges. They don't tend to make particularly controversial decisions, nor are they divided along partisan lines. I vaguely recall The Daily Mail describing some high court judges as "enemies of the people" due to some sort of Brexit-related shenanigans, but it all blew over within a couple of days; the overwhelming consensus was that the headline was crass and slanderous. Other than that, I don't recall the last time the judiciary were particularly newsworthy.

While this is true, also remember how powerful the US supreme court is. Due to a combination of common law (binding precedent) and an old, difficult to change, ambiguous constitution, the US Supreme Court is arguably even more powerful than the president.

> While this is true, also remember how powerful the US supreme court is. Due to a combination of common law (binding precedent) and an old, difficult to change, ambiguous constitution, the US Supreme Court is arguably even more powerful than the president.

To me, this is an amazing aspect of the American justice system. Nine individuals, chosen over a broad range of years, are the last bastion of hope in keeping the current politics du jour from running amok. Nine individuals who were most likely all not chosen by the same person, have multitudinous alignments and bring their various perspectives to the table. When they come together in agreement, it is undoubtedly just given their diversty over the decades.

Or at least in theory.

There are interesting parallels there to the House of Lords in the UK, which more often than not holds the government to account better than the Commons. It does seem that sometimes pure democracy needs tempering.

(Curiously, the House of Lords was the top court in the UK before the Supreme Court was created recently)

SCOTUS is quite restrained, meaning that a lot of the power is in the lower courts.

> But just for fun, let's see if anyone from Belgium, UK, Greece, Spain, etc can name 5 top judges. I, for one, cannot :)

I wonder how many people can name Norman Borlaug and what he did vs Adolf Hitler and what he did.

Well... They CAN be voted out... Its a vote that's not regularly held, you have to be personally nominated for being voted out, and you need a 2/3 majority of the Senate to vote against you...