Ask AP: Following Sotomayor, Movie Closed Captions

A list of theaters offering the Rear Window closed captioning system can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/qwl3rv

Michelle Chapman

AP Business Writer

New York

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President Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to be a Supreme Court justice has been a huge story in the news ever since it was announced. Does the public in other Western democracies pay the same amount of attention to high court appointees, or is this a uniquely American phenomenon?

Daniel Lippman

Washington

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This sort of thing isn't unique to the U.S. — it's just a more extreme version of what goes on in many other countries.

The public and the media follow high court nominations most closely in common-law countries, where the judiciary plays a bigger role in defining laws — and so has more influence over people's everyday lives. The U.S. federal judiciary uses common law; other common-law countries include Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India and Pakistan.