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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."
They did 9/11 and we still have no justice :(
If you find this post offensive, don't read it! THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING! I am what I am because of how apes behave.
I love deep dicking pussy.
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that racial quotas are in the best interest of the USA regardless of the law), then the results of the exam will be rescinded, denying promotion to the firefighters.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.
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.
The Constitution is in some ways an ambiguous document and each of the justices has a different idea of how it should be interpreted
The Constitution is not the Quran to be "interpreted" in many different ways.
the Constitution is the LAW. It is not a religious document (as neocons want it) and it is not a piece of paper (as illiterate Bush thought it was)
It clearly defines the contract between the People (and that includes resident non-citizens), the States and the Federal Government.
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.
Don't you read history?
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
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.
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.
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?
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.
He insured Building 7 for $9 billion exactly 2 weeks before. Building 7 was the 3rd sky-scraper that was DEMOLISHED with the World Trade Center Towers. Building 7 was more important, it housing various offices for U.S. Treasury, IRS, BATF, FBI, CIA, et al. Dirtbag Silverstein even admitted making the decision to "pull it" within 30 minutes of WTC towers going down, all because he believed the minor "fire damage" on the roof made it unstable! Look it up on Youtube while you still can, and look up some of the half-true films produced by Jesuit Alex Jones.
It's too bad James von Brunn isn't around anymore since being mind-controlled into wasting time on some jewbait T.V. distraction from real world events by shooting-up that Life-Insurance Museum. CIA is known to kidnap White Nationalists, re-program them with torture techniques, then unleash their jew-law of the Jungle onto the world with such horror so as to draw such ill-opinion to a scholastic lifestyle of moral integrity as was James von Brunn.
I visit STORMFRONT everyday and converse with those whiggers to help them lose the His-story taught by Jewmedias. It's all Jews nowdays. Even Obamma bin Laden is a molatto Jew. Send that village idiot of Kenya back to muslim Indonesia, and digg up that grave of his poor grandmother and honor her to a better place in arlington for not going along with the New World Order's plan to move Bary Soros (true name prior to "Barack Hussein" being assumed) into an illegitimate government position.
"The only mistake Hitler made was that he didn't kill the jews."
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
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.
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.
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.
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.