Introduction While few people would argue against the proposition that the Supreme Court Justices are some of the most intelligent legal luminaries in the United States, these luminaries often rule in opposing directions. The number of the Court’s split decisions often outnumber the number of unanimous decisions. During the 2021 Term, the number of 6-3…
Category: Ideology
Where We Are at the End of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Term
Recently there has been quite a bit of discussion on social media and in the press regarding inferences we can make from data on Supreme Court Justices’ behavior. One critique raised was that levels of unanimity do not show that the Court is necessarily moving to the left or to the right as a unit…
Was it Ever Really Roberts’ Court?
It has been a long two weeks for the Supreme Court. Since the leak of Alito’s opinion in the Dobbs abortion case, several of the Supreme Court Justices have come forward offering their thoughts on the leak. According to the Washington Post, “Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. called the leak ‘absolutely appalling.’ The Supreme…
Does the Supreme Court React to Congressional Preferences?
In the 2019 case United States v. Davis, Justice Gorsuch began with an important statement regarding constitutional statutes. Gorsuch wrote, “In our constitutional order, a vague law is no law at all. Only the people’s elected representatives in Congress have the power to write new federal criminal laws. And when Congress exercises that power, it…
The Ideological Status-Quo in Supreme Court COVID-19 Litigation
The Court has decided 16 cases on emergency application related to the COVID-19 restrictions with obvious battle lines drawn between the justices (the 16 cases is after removing cases that appeared before the Court twice). The Court’s newest appointee, Justice Barrett, helped establish herself on the Court’s right with her first opinion in the COVID…
How the Court’s Decisions Limit the National Electorate
This post looks at the Supreme Court’s election law jurisprudence under the Roberts Court. Supreme Court opinions and applications were searched from 2005 through the present for the term “election.” All cases were examined and any that related to elections or voting procedures were maintained in the dataset. Cases were broken down across several issues…
Clear Polarization in Second Level Supreme Court Decision Making
Over the past five Supreme Court Terms the justices have issued 157 separate opinions from Court orders. These are cases that are not orally argued and do not receive full merits consideration. We do not necessarily know all the justices votes in these cases – only the ones the justices made public through signing onto separate opinions. Of these 157 opinions, only two include at least one conservative and one liberal justice signed onto the same opinion. Both are dissents from Justices Gorsuch and Sotomayor in criminal cases. The other 155 separate opinions split the justices ideologically or are solo authored. The spotlight on the Court’s polarization could not be clearer.
Precedent: Which Justices Practice What They Preach
While Supreme Court Justices are by no means bound by their past decisions, the Court often respects its past decisions for a variety of reasons. The reasons given for adhering the Court’s past precedents are often across between cases. Justice Kagan offered her interpretation for remaining faithful to precedent in dissent in last term’s Knick…
Interesting Meetings of the Minds of Supreme Court Justices
Unanimity in the Supreme Court used to be the norm. In the early Supreme Court there were few dissents and so there was little opportunity to see differences between the justices’ views outside of how they authored their majority opinions. This practice has changed over the years as now decisions are more frequently divided rather…
Empirical SCOTUS 