Talk:Ideological leanings of United States Supreme Court justices

misleading graphs

The graphs are not misleading in the sense that they are the result of an objective quantitative process that is blind as to ideology, the item response theory by means of the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method. They are misleading in several substantive ways. For example, to the extent that the Supreme Court's choosing of the disputes that they decide means that over time very different types of disputes are used as input to determine ideological leanings. More significantly, the algorithm is forced to see difference only in one dimension, which the researchers call liberal-to-conservative. Legal reasoning is a vastly multidimensional system and reducing it to a single dimension hides tons of information. Maybe it also reveals some information but, after years of working in the area, I am still trying to ascertain exactly how to interpret these. The graphs do contain some information, however, uninterpretable as it may be, and should not be deleted. Ngeorgak (talk) 20:11, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

Both of these are misleading graphs in that they are skewed toward the liberal side, this making the court appear more conservative than it is. If the liberal goes down to -7, the conservative should go up to 7. If the liberal goes down to -2.5, the conservative goes up to 2.5. I understand that this would essentially be whitespace since no justice is that "conservative" according to the data, but that whitespace conveys useful information.

By placing the centerline of the political axis left of center, these graphs necessitate a close reading to understand that the courts are not as overwhelmingly conservative as they first appear. For the record I am a lifelong Democratic partisan and I believe the court IS skewed toward the conservative ideology...just not as much as is portrayed by these graphics. 75.130.132.103 (talk) 01:21, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

As the text of the article says about the first graph, "Note that the scale and zero point are arbitrary – only the relative distance of the lines is important." I could have left the numbers completely off the left-hand scale, but since the authors use numbers, this seemed like it would be a mistake and would make the graphs even more difficult to understand and interpret. Instead, I specifically noted that these numbers don't mean much. In the second graph, the numbers do mean something since they are meant to be consistent with the DW-Nominate scores calculated for members of Congress, presidents, etc. But the connection to Congress/President is not strong, so even that is a stretch.

Of course, it is entirely unclear what the whole concept of the zero point means on a conservative-liberal scale. Is someone who has a zero value neither liberal nor conservative? What does that mean — they have no values? Or does it just mean they are more liberal than conservatives and more conservative than liberals — that is, the scale is rather arbitrary. Another way to look at this is that over the past 80 years, the members of the Supreme Court have ranged from –7 to 6 on a liberal-conservative scale. So a "moderate" justice might be considered as someone who is halfway between these extremes, i.e., –0.5. Or one could eyeball the graph and say that most of the justices have concentrated around 0.5 so that must be what a "moderate" justice looks like. Either assessment is valid, but neither is the "correct" view. The correct way to view this graph, as I tried to convey in the text: a visual indicator of the relative ideological bent of the justices over time.

By the way, the first graph does indicate that none of the current justices is now voting in as liberal a way as "liberal" Republican Earl Warren did in his whole Supreme Court career or even "moderate" Republican Sandra Day O'Connor did at the end of her stint. So that is a pretty good indicator that the courts now are, actually, pretty overwhelmingly conservative. But there are many other ways to interpret the graphs too (and the individual votes of the justices behind the values), especially depending on your definition of liberal and conservative. And in any interpretation of this analysis, one must take note of the many assumptions behind the values and their large uncertainty, as well as the difficulty in comparing justices of different eras. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Randy Schutt (talk • contribs) 19:29, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

moderate liberal justices appointed by Democrats

Editor 2601:601:9E00:2A6:E2C1:674B:4839:13DA made a change on June 29, 2023 and stated "Removed misquote. Partisan implication not found in quoted source." This is not true.

Here is the original journal article: p. 357: "... The increasing ideological distance between Democratic- and Republican-appointed Justices is largely a story of changes in the Republican Party. As a group, the Republican-appointed Justices have been appreciably more conservative than previous Republican nominees.263 For their part, Democratic-appointed Justices are more homogeneous than before, but as a group they are not more liberal. Unlike previous Democratic appointees (some of whom were very liberal and others of whom were either moderate or conservative), all of today’s Democratic-appointed Justices are moderate liberals.264 ..." [my bold] — Devins, Neal; Baum, Lawrence (2017). "Split definitive: How party polarization turned the Supreme Court into a partisan court". The Supreme Court Review. University of Chicago Law School. 2016 (1): 301–365. doi:10.1086/691096. S2CID 142355294

The Wiki entry summarizes the gist of the journal article, but does not quote it directly. However, the "moderate liberal" part is right there in this paragraph. The journal article is now six years old, but the Trump appointments since then have certainly confirmed the overall thesis of the article. It is not yet clear if Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (appointed by Democrat Joe Biden) is also a "moderate liberal," but so far there is no indication that she is not. So her appointment also probably confirms the central thesis. Randy Schutt (talk) 16:29, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

New scholarship: It is not just cases, but also the questions that the Supreme Court chooses

I've changed the first two paragraphs of this article for two reasons: (1) the first part duplicates many of the first lines of the Supreme Court of the United States article and is a more appropriate introduction there (and is really not appropriate here), and (2) the part about only deciding cases (not questions) is actually not true as shown by Ben Johnson, professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law in three recent articles:

Johnson, Benjamin B. "The origins of Supreme Court question selection." Columbia Law Review 122.3 (2022): 793-864. https://columbialawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Johnson-The_Origins_Of_Supreme_Court_Question_Selection.pdf

"... The modern Court has effectively abandoned the traditional judicial role of deciding cases in favor of targeting preselected questions. This arrangement may serve the Court’s institutional interests, but it also pulls the Court into politics. ..."

Johnson, Benjamin B. "The Active Vices." Alabama Law Review 74 (2022): 917. https://www.law.ua.edu/lawreview/files/2023/05/4-Johnson-917-966.pdf

Johnson, Benjamin B. "The Supreme Court, Question-Selection, Legitimacy, and Reform: Three Theorems and One Suggestion." Saint Louis University Law Journal 67 (2022): 625. https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2351&context=lj

I've also added a reference to Johnson's findings in the Ideological Leanings Over Time section.@@@@ Randy Schutt (talk) 14:24, 29 December 2023 (UTC)