The United States Supreme Court is the highest federal court of the United States. The justices base their decisions on their interpretation of both legal doctrine and the precedential application of laws in the past. Using statistical analysis of Supreme Court votes, scholars found that an inferred value representing a Justice’s ideological preference is sufficient to predict a large number of that justice’s votes.
About Ideological leanings of United States Supreme Court justices in brief
The United States Supreme Court is the highest federal court of the United States. The justices base their decisions on their interpretation of both legal doctrine and the precedential application of laws in the past. Using statistical analysis of Supreme Court votes, scholars found that an inferred value representing a Justice’s ideological preference on a simple conservative–liberal scale is sufficient to predict a large number of that justice’s votes. The graph below shows the results of their analysis: the ideological leaning of each justice from the term that began in October 1937 to the term in October 2019. Each unique color represents a particular Supreme Court seat, which makes the transitions from retiring justices to newly appointed justices easier to follow. The black lines represent the leanings of the Chief Justices. The yellow line represents the estimated location of the median justice, who, as Duncan Black’s median voter theorem posits, is often the swing vote in closely divided decisions. The scale and zero point are arbitrary—only the relative distance of the lines is important.
The two graphs differ because of the choices of the sources of data and because of complicated coding of the data. As in the graph above, each unique color is a particular seat for the Supreme Court, and each black line is the seat of a particular Chief Justice of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The graphs below show the ideological leans of each Supreme Court justice by calendar year from 1950 to 2011, but not the major topics in the postwar area of free speech, civil rights, abortion, religion, or economic or economic issues. These graphs differ from the two graphs because the two data sources differ of the choice of coding, coding, and complicated parameters of complicated cases, such as the number of cases, amicus filings by Solicitors General and members of Congress, and presidential and Congressional positions on Court cases. The results of the graphs below are based on the data from CNN’s analysis of the votes in every contested Supreme Court case since 1937.
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This page is based on the article Ideological leanings of United States Supreme Court justices published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
