Ideological Leanings of Supreme Court Justices

In: Politics Source: Washington Post

26 Mar 2013

Two different analyses of supreme court decisions. I didn’t dig into the methodology, but the papers are available if you’re interested.

The so-called Quinn-Martin scores show the court trending significantly to the right in recent years, with even its left flank being relatively middle-of-the-road, relative to history.

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Bailey shows the court has become significantly more conservative since, for example, the 1960s, he still pegs the four more liberal justices as clearly to the left of the court, historically speaking. In addition, Bailey’s model actually suggests the court, while more conservative than in most of the last several decades, isn’t all that much more so than it was in the 1970s or when Sandra Day O’Connor was the swing vote in the 1990s and early 2000s.

 

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