U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts said Tuesday the scene at President Barack Obama's first State of the Union address was "very troubling" and that the annual speech to Congress has "degenerated into a political pep rally."

Responding to a University of Alabama law student's question about the Senate's method of confirming justices, Roberts said senators improperly try to make political points by asking questions they know nominees can't answer because of judicial ethics rules.

"I think the process is broken down," he said.

Obama chided the court for its campaign finance decision during the January address, with six of the court's nine justices seated before him in their black robes.

Roberts said he wonders whether justices should attend the address.

"To the extent the State of the Union has degenerated into a political pep rally, I'm not sure why we're there," said Roberts, a Republican nominee who joined the court in 2005.

Roberts said anyone is free to criticize the court and that some have an obligation to do so because of their positions.

"So I have no problems with that," he said. "On the other hand, there is the issue of the setting, the circumstances and the decorum. The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering while the court — according the requirements of protocol — has to sit there expressionless, I think is very troubling."

Breaking from tradition, Obama used the speech to criticize the court's decision that allows corporations and unions to freely spend money to run political ads for or against specific candidates.

The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to referee a dispute between NASA and some of its independent contractors over required security checks, a decision that could affect how the federal government investigates the background of current and future employees.

The justices agreed to hear an appeal from the space agency, which had its worker investigations at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California blocked after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the questions threatened the constitutional rights of workers.

The high court's decision in this case could throw into question the background checks routinely done on all federal government workers.

While the case before the court deals solely with whether to dissolve the temporary restraining order placed on NASA's background checks at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA said in its filings that the forms in question "are the same ones that have long been used to conduct background checks for applicants for federal employment."

Twenty-eight scientists and engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory sued the federal government after NASA required them to submit to background checks. They said the agency was invading their privacy by requiring the investigations, which included probes into medical records and questioning of friends about everything from their finances to their sex lives.

A UC Berkeley constitutional law professor and civil rights advocate was nominated Wednesday by President Obama to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

Goodwin Liu, 39, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, learned English in kindergarten and later became an honors graduate at Stanford and a Rhodes Scholar. He has taught at Berkeley since 2003 and was named associate dean of the law school in 2008.

He also worked as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and as a special assistant to the deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Education.

Liu is one of two Asian Americans nominated by Obama to the federal appeals courts, which now have no active Asian American judges. The Ninth Circuit handles federal cases from California and eight other Western states and has three vacancies among its 29 authorized judgeships.

"Goodwin Liu is an outstanding teacher, a brilliant scholar and an exceptional public servant," said the law school's dean, Christopher Edley.

The nomination also won praise from Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and from Tom Campbell, a UC Berkeley business professor and former congressman who is seeking the Republican nomination to run against Boxer.

Campbell said Liu would bring "scholarly distinction and a strong reputation for integrity, fair-mindedness and collegiality to the Ninth Circuit."

But Senate confirmation may not be routine. Some of Liu's positions could draw conservative opposition, which has held up other judicial nominees.

Liu testified in January 2006 against President George W. Bush's nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, saying Alito's judicial opinions were well-reasoned but indicated a tilt in favor of prosecutors and the government. He did not testify against Chief Justice John Roberts but told a reporter before the 2005 confirmation hearing that he thought Roberts would move the court to the right.

The California Supreme Court on Thursday questioned the constitutionality of a provision of "Jessica's Law" that lets authorities indefinitely confine sexually violent predators.
It's the first of two decisions the court is expected to issue in the coming days over the legality of the law that was passed as Proposition 82 by 70 percent of voters in 2006.

The Supreme Court is scheduled to rule Monday on a separate legal challenge to a provision prohibiting released predators from living within 2,000 feet of a school or park.

On Thursday, the court dealt with the issue of whether sexually violent predators can be treated differently than other violent felons, who can only be held for defined terms in mental health facilities after prison.

In a 5-2 decision written by Justice Carlos Moreno, the Supreme Court offered suggestions about how government lawyers should approach the case.

Moreno said it could be that mental disorders make it likely that sexually violent predators will re-offend. Or, they could "pose a greater risk to a particularly vulnerable class of victims, such as children," Moreno noted.

Nonetheless, Moreno concluded the government had not produced any evidence to distinguish sexual predators from other violent offenders. California Deputy Attorney General Bradley A. Weinreb, who argued the case before the Supreme Court, didn't return a telephone call.

A divided U.S. Supreme Court struck down decades-old restrictions on corporate campaign spending, reversing two of its precedents and freeing companies to conduct advertising campaigns that explicitly try to sway voters.

The 5-4 majority, invoking the Constitution's free-speech clause, said the government lacks a legitimate basis to restrict independent campaign expenditures by companies. The ruling went well beyond the circumstances in the case before the justices, a dispute over a documentary film attacking then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

"When government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority. "This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves."

Companies, which had been barred since 1947 from using general-treasury dollars in support of or in opposition to a candidate, now can spend millions of dollars on their own campaign ads, potentially punishing or rewarding lawmakers for their votes on legislation. Labor unions, though they weren't directly at issue in the case, have been subject to the same restrictions and may also now expand their political spending.

The Supreme Court split along ideological lines Wednesday as it barred a federal judge in San Francisco from broadcasting a high-profile trial involving same-sex marriage.

The court issued an unsigned opinion that said lower courts had not followed proper procedure in approving plans for the broadcast. The trial is to consider the constitutionality of Proposition 8, California's ban on same-sex marriage, and the Supreme Court cited arguments from proponents of the ban that releasing video of witnesses could subject them to harassment and even physical danger.

The court's liberal bloc -- joined for the first time in an ideological split by Sonia Sotomayor, the new justice -- issued a strong dissent. It said the court's "extraordinary legal relief" was unjustified.

The majority "identifies no real harm" from televising the trial, "let alone irreparable harm to justify its issuance of this stay," wrote Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who was joined by Sotomayor and Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. "And the public interest weighs in favor of providing access to the courts."

The court on Monday blocked U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker's plan to stream live video from the trial, which started that day, to five courthouses across the country and to later release the proceedings for broadcast on YouTube. The justices' more complete ruling came at the end of the day Wednesday.