Slashdot Mirror
Visualizing the Ideological History of SCOTUS
langelgjm writes "An interesting exercise in quantifying and visualizing ideological shifts, the website ScotusScores.com tracks changes in the ideological history of the US Supreme Court from 1937 to 2007. Ideological positions are quantified using Martin-Quinn scores, and the chart highlights the often-bumpy transitions (Thurgood Marshall to Clarence Thomas), as well as tendencies within each Justice's career."
Souter's leaving, Ginsburg is likely to leave in the next two or three years (to ensure that Obama gets to choose her replacement), Stevens is likely to do the same... and all of them are considered likely at this point to be replaced by more distinctly progressive justices, since for the first time in decades there's a Democratic President with a Democratic Senate that can actually confirm his choices easily. None of the hard-right justices (Scalia, Alito, Thomas, or Roberts) is going to be stepping down voluntarily any time soon, but Kennedy might be getting some inclinations that way based on not being fond of being the constant swing vote, subject to pressures from all of his colleagues all the time.
Long? What do you mean the signature at the bottom of every comment I post on Slashdot is too lo
Tufte might grouse though about all the small fonts and the overloading of the vertical axis...
Some things jump right out at me...
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Most political historians have long ago switched to the proper 4-Act Quinn Martin system.
Consider the case of the firefighters in New Haven. If the SCOTUS decides this case on the sole basis of the legal statutes (that government shall not hire or promote on the basis of skin color), then the results of the exam will be upheld. All the white firefighters and the 1 Hispanic firefighter should be promoted. If the SCOTUS decides this case on the basis of ideology (i. e., the idea that racial quotas are in the best interest of the USA regardless of the law), then the results of the exam will be rescinded, denying promotion to the firefighters.
These days, the SCOTUS is expected to be ideological. So, political parties, lobbyists, and any other political critter will try his hardest to support a candidate (for justice of SCOTUS) who (1) is willing to make a decision on the basis of ideology and (2) exhibits the ideology that the political critter supports.
70 years of history is a good start, but the court is 220 years old this year, so I hope they'll be expanding their timeline. It'd be interesting to see how the court in our lifetimes compares to the previous 150 years.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
LOL forget about that little checkbox called AC?
One of the things that immediately struck me was that the conservative judges seemed to be more conservative than the liberal judges were liberal, based on the vividness of the color. Aha, I thought, I knew the liberals were more moderate!
But actually I think that's an artifact of the way the coloring was done. Look at Rehnquist as an associate and see the vivid red that his first year shows as, which is 3.98. Now look at Thurgood Marshall, below him, and find a -3.95. Those should look pretty similar in terms of intensity, but the blue looks much closer to white than the red does.
What I think is happening is this. They are color coding not on absolutes like that, but based on the distance between 0 and the most conservative or liberal number. But the most liberal justice is at -6, which the most conservative one is only at -5. So if you get a 4, that's 80% of the way to being the most conservative, but someone who is equivalently liberal at -4 is only 66% of the way to being the most liberal. So they get a color that looks like they are 66 points away from moderate as opposed to 80 points for the conservatives.
Well that's misleading. I think the color gradation changes need to be symmetrical across the graph or it's going to be super confusing. Maybe just call -5 the most liberal you can be and don't worry about shading Douglas more? Or make 6 the most conservative you can be and give up the super deep red color for now.
Bum-bah-dum-dum -- Bum-bah-dum-dum-dummmmmmmmmmmmm.
He has been inventing stuff too. He went with liberals in stretching the Commerce Clause to absurdity in Gonzales v. Raich.
Well that's misleading
The chart's not meant to be honest. The point is that its a bunch of liberals in a liberal university making their political point that the right is more radical than the left when the reverse is arguably true.
This is my sig.
To specifically avoid the ambiguity that the British non-constitution has, the Founders made sure the document was written, written well in clear lucid writing and signed by all the Founders as a sort of ratification.
Oh yeah: "Unreasonable", "necessary and proper", "probable cause", "due process", "cruel and unusual". Yep, nothing to interpret there.
Wait a minute...
... and that's when the C.H.U.D.'s came at me.
Except it doesn't clearly define a contract in many cases. There's a lot of wiggle room and undefined terms- partly because there was no way to define them and get the ratification of all the states, partly because they made them vague on purpose- because a system (which is what the Constitution truly creates) without the ability to adapt quickly becomes useless.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
The correct interpretation of the Constitution is that it is a treaty among the states to cede some limited power to the federal government. You don't want to go randomly inventing new terms or "living" it out because that changes the terms of the deal that binds the states together. Think of the Constitution as a TOS for the US Federal Gov't. Every time a court changes it, its a TOS change without your consent.
And it should not need to.
The Constitution does not give people rights, as the left is fond of saying, it is that the government only has limited powers and the states and people have all the rest. Thus, even if there was no 2nd amendment, the federal government would STILL be not allowed to regulate firearms. But of course, people just trample the constitution and on both sides of the aisle. The EPA, DOE, and many other left wing laws are clearly unconstitutional, but so too are things like the defense of marriage act..
This is my sig.
The Constitution is not the Quran to be "interpreted" in many different ways.
Almost every amendment has at least one angle for interpretation.
- When does something printed move from news to libel?
- What arms do the people have the right to possess?
- All of the possible nuances of the way in which the state may come into possession of evidence means that "reasonable search" has changed over time.
- What is a valid public use of private property?
- If a witness dies before a trial begins, how much, if any, of a deposition made by the deceased should be allowed at trial, since they cannot be confronted by the defendant?
- The definition of "cruel and unusual punishment" has changed markedly over time for US society. Death penalty? Castration? Long-term solitary confinement?
- Does a person have an inherent right to get married?
- If a state passes a law that directly contradicts a federal law, who wins out?
That's the Bill of Rights in order, minus Amendments III and VII, for which I couldn't think of anything off the top of my head. All of those are open to interpretation to some degree. One may have no limits, or one may have complete limits, but most people fall in-between, and that range is why there is interpretation at all.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Just read it. Too many things (like "commerce between the states") are left undefined.No, it doesn't. As an example, let me pick the most non-controversial one (by Slashdot standards) I can think of off the top of my head, the Fourth Amendment. Here's one of the questions they throw at you in law school:
The first clause says people are protected from unreasonable searches and seizures, and the second clause says no warrants without certain requirements. Does this mean that you need a warrant to arrest people? There are two ways to read it; the first is that the two clauses are connected and a warrant is necessary for all arrests, the other is that arrests just need to be reasonable, and that if a police officer chooses to get a warrant, then it must be supported by oath or affirmation, etc. Both are valid readings of the text, with two very different results.
What a crappy graphic on page one. Gratuitous animation and no legend. My initial reaction is to expect no meaningful content.
There's nothing like a simple diagram made completely unreadable by needless flashiness. Fancy graphics shouldn't be more important than the subject matter at hand. Too many web page and game designers just don't get this.
Even so, marquee text became practically obsolete on the web in about 1997. Why would one ever dream of implementing the marquee chart?
No you don't. I can tell from here that you're an unashamed bum bandit.
Apparently not. Look at his posting history. He repeats this nonsense over and over again.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
At first, I was amazed at how smoothly justices change over time, which makes the plot look very pretty. Then, I clicked on the link for the Martin-Quinn score, and saw this in the description: "The measures are estimated using a dynamic item response theory model, allowing judicial ideology to trend smoothly through time." I haven't looked into the math (all I can find after a quick search on their page is some custom C code), but the smoothing looks pretty severe, i.e. over several years.
There are on the order of 75-150 cases heard a year (it has been decreasing from 150 since the 80s) in the court - these are enough data points that they could bin the plot over a few months and show it without smoothing. My guess is this looks far less pretty.
Yeah, and it's amazing how many US people keep waving their Constitution about but don't actually read it.
It's like lot of people spouting just a few verses from the their favourite religious text but not reading the rest of it (or realizing it's not as simple as that - understanding the spirit of the document and it's implications today, takes a fair bit of effort and time).
The US constitution isn't just the amendments. Yes the amendments are pretty important, but the fact that there are a fair number of amendments should tell you the Founders didn't come up with such a well written document as so many appear to think.
See:
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html
And compare with the annotated version (with cases etc)
http://www.law.cornell.edu/anncon/
You'll find there's so much interpretation required. So the Judges are extremely important since they interpret the Constitution and Laws. If you have crappy courts and judges you can get very bad interpretations.
There's plenty of room for interpretation see:
No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.
So what is "consent of the Congress", "Office of Profit/Trust" or present? Do they have to vote on it whenever a foreign King or Queen wants to give a US Senator/President a signed picture frame? Or can Congress put "anything less than $$$/month is automatically OK" in some law and be done with it?
This is completely useless. Some guys named Martin and Quinn estimate positions on a political spectrum using "Martin Quinn scores", which are not explained (the link to the explanation explains nothing.)
So, what, they guess the justices' politics and then graph their guesses?
If they don't explain how they calculated the numbers, this data is useless, or possibly worse than useless, being opinion masquerading as fact.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
If your second reading is correct, then by that same reading, no warrant is needed for a search. I had never really thought about it before, but it is clear to me from the Court rulings on searches without a warrant, that current police practices for arresting people is in violation of the 4th Amendment.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Consider the case of the firefighters in New Haven [latimes.com]. If the SCOTUS decides this case on the sole basis of the legal statutes (that government shall not hire or promote on the basis of skin color), then the results of the exam will be upheld.
You've managed to pick an example that precisely contradicts the point you're trying to make. The statute makes clear that the courts must prevent laws that are either directly or indirectly discriminatory (with lots of legislative debate and commentary to make it clear that they meant the second part).
(There was a reason for this wording: during the 20th century there were many examples of conditions that were not directly discriminatory on their face, but were clearly intended to have the effect of discriminating. Egregious example: requiring a literacy test as a condition for voting. So the Congress made strong laws to deal even with this sort of back-door discrimination.)
Now in the Ricci case, a series of courts actually went ahead and enforced a law as written by Congress. Which is precisely what you claim to want the court to do. And yet, since you're unhappy with the outcome, you charge "judicial activism". But you're absolutely turned around in this case.
Now, let's be clear: if you don't like the way the laws are written, you could take it to Congress and get them changed. But you're not doing that, and I doubt that there's much public support for it. Which is telling. So instead of working through the legislative process, you misread the law and try to claim that the courts are modifying it, when they're enforcing it exactly the way Congress instructed them to.
If your second reading is correct, then by that same reading, no warrant is needed for a search. I had never really thought about it before, but it is clear to me from the Court rulings on searches without a warrant, that current police practices for arresting people is in violation of the 4th Amendment.
Of course under this interpretation then it would be unconstitutional for the police to try to arrest a person coming out of a bank with a sack full of money and a smoking gun in their hands, because they lacked a warrant for that individual. Yet I doubt the SCOTUS would ever overturn a robbery conviction where an arrest was made on these grounds.
Political "science" is no more science than creation "science" is science. This article belongs under politics.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I wonder what the scores are for "The Streets of San Francisco" or "The FBI".
I'm sure that "The Fugitive" is the highest of the bunch!
My assumption upon cursory examination is that the "conservative" indicator (red) and the "liberal" indicator (blue) would meet at 0.00, since the red numbers have positive numbers while the blue numbers have negative values. However, the actual transition seems to occur at approximately -0.8. The result, it would seem, is a overall picture that, at first glance, appears more conservative than it actually is.
Funny that you mention stormfront. I visit there sometimes too. Basically just to tell them what losers they are and remind them that my big black penis is something they'll never be able to compete with.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Is it me or does the shade of red seem much deeper at -4.0 verses the shade of blue for +4.0?
No matter where you go, there you are.
Only SCOTUS has explicitly stated that police can make arrests without a warrant. They apply a slightly stricter requirement for searches. So basically the Court has adopted the second interpetation, but they have decided that searches have stricter warrant requirements than arrests. Just another example of working with an ambiguous document.
This provides pretty good support for the claim that liberals think of themselves as being moderate and everyone else as being conservative. Fairly predictable for collusion between a couple of liberal hotspots.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
Well if I understood Wickard v. Filburn if you produce a large amount of wheat for use by your own farm that's interstate commerce and can be regulated even if there's no commerce and nothing going between states. Supposedly the reason is that it meant he didn't have to buy wheat which might be interstate commerce. (By that train of though if you grow your own tomatoes in a garden because the California ones in the supermarket suck well you're doing interstate commerce by not doing interstate commerce.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.