Talk:Ideological leanings of United States Supreme Court justices

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)

If you want to directly address "partisanship" I would recommend adding a section about "Polarization". This would make sense and accurately summarize the source you are citing. The section title was "Partisan balance". I have changed it to "Ideological balance". Ideological balance is a term that is used by reliable sources - partisan balance is not. I am reading about both ideological balance and polarization. If your intent with this section was, in fact, to discuss "Polarization", we can restructure the content accordingly. The article should not have a "thesis", by the way. It should just be an article. Antignomi (talk) 17:11, 27 July 2024 (UTC)

This section, before you altered it, described the balance between justices appointed by Democrats and Republicans. The first 3 paragraphs (which you removed) show that presidential appointments often reflect the ideology of the president, but not completely. This was true from 1937-1994 (as indicated by the first reference you removed) and even more so since 2010 (as the last reference indicated). The graph then showed the balance between those justices appointed by Democrats and Republicans. This section did no more and no less than this.

The graph you removed shows the reality of how many appointments have been made by each party. It is based entirely on the Wikipedia article List of justices of the Supreme Court of the United States just as the Timeline at the bottom of that page is. It is fully sourced.

By the way, every article on Wikipedia has a "thesis". For most (all?) articles the thesis is describing some part of reality. The thesis of this article was describing the ideological leanings of the justices of the Supreme Court. It did that. Now you have changed the thesis and title.

The other sections that you altered also were fully sourced (often from links to other Wikipedia articles) and further described ways to measure the ideology of Supreme Court justices of the US and the results of those analyses. Randy Schutt (talk) 16:34, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

Is the article as you conceive it supposed to be about measuring the ideologies of the individual justices and how they vote or the partisan balance of the Court itself? Antignomi (talk) 16:39, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

The article was titled "Ideological leanings of United States Supreme Court justices". Following the lead of scholars who study the Supreme Court, this article reported the ideological lean of individual US Supreme Court justices (as much as that can be discerned), but also the results of their work after those justices interact with each other (and with their clerks), sway each other, and are led by the Chief Justice as they issue their decisions. Researchers have tried to discern these things in various ways and the article summarized the best of those methods as well as the results they have found, describing in particular how the decisions of the Court have changed over the years as the justices have been replaced with others and as their ideological bent seems to change over time. This was not an article specifically about the partisan balance on the court -- though, since that is one simple way of determining the ideological leanings of the justices and the direction of the court overall, it is a common way to characterize the likely outcome of SC decisions, and it seems to be increasingly useful as a measure, it was included too. And it certainly wasn't an article about statistical methods or any other particular method of determining the ideology of the justices.

This article has existed for almost 12 years and the first section on Partisan Balance was added over 18 months ago. During all that time it has been a very popular page and has been largely accepted by every other Wikipedia editor who works on Supreme Court pages (at least to judge by the few comments on the Talk page). No one else felt the need to alter it in significant ways, discard major parts of it, or change its title. Other editors thought it was valuable enough that they made dozens of links to the page as it was.

You have moved very quickly to discard major parts of the article and retitle it. As far as I can tell, you did not check with anyone else before you made these major changes, and you have moved so quickly that others have not had time to weigh in (as of now, it has been fewer than 18 hours since you made your first edit on this page). What do you think you are doing?

If you want to create a new Wikipedia page on some related topic, you should do that (and follow the guidelines for new editors). Randy Schutt (talk) 20:23, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

Before my changes there were two sections for "ideological changes of the justices over time". Content about the justices was mixed in with content about the balance of the Court. That content was already in the "Partisan balance section". Why is removing that a problem? "Few comments on the talk page" is hardly a good reason.

Your explanation for why the ideological balance section should be in the article is different from mine. This would have implications for the title.

Ideological balance study is related to the now accepted academic literature about judicial decision making. Balance becomes critical once we accept the academic literature about how judges make decisions.

You say it is a "simple way of determining the ideological leanings of the justices and the direction of the court overall, it is a common way to characterize the likely outcome of SC decisions, and it seems to be increasingly useful as a measure".

Are you sure that it is a "way of determining the ideological leanings of the justices"? If this is correct than would "measuring judicial ideology" be a broad enough title to include all the content you want to include in the article? Or would something like "Judicial ideology on the United States Supreme Court" be better for what you want this article to be about? Antignomi (talk) 07:58, 29 July 2024 (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)

Discussion of disputed removal of specific content

The Supreme Court has not had 10 seats since 1863. I have no idea what the editor intended here:

• The most volatile seat appears to be Seat 10 (light blue lines), which was held by conservative Pierce Butler until 1939, then liberal Frank Murphy until 1949, then moderate-conservative Tom Clark until 1967, then strong liberal Thurgood Marshall until 1991, and then strong conservative Clarence Thomas.

I think this should be restored, pending the outcome of the above discussion on the article title and inclusion of a "Partisan balance section":

• As the more moderate Republican justices retired, the court has become more sharply along ideological lines with justices appointed by Republican presidents taking increasingly conservative positions and those appointed by Democrats taking moderate liberal positions.(DevinsBaum) According to Devins and Baum "before 2010, the Court never had clear ideological blocs that coincided with party lines". In choosing their appointments, Presidents often focused more on friendship and political connections than on ideology. Republican presidents sometimes appointed liberals and Democratic presidents sometimes appointed conservatives. As a result, "... between 1790 and early 2010 there were only two decisions that the Guide to the U.S. Supreme Court designated as important and that had at least two dissenting votes in which the Justices divided along party lines, about one-half of one percent." (DevinsBaum)

The section "Ideological shifts since 1937" is a verbal explanation of the graph data. The editor-created graphs were not removed. There are no sources cited other than referring to the editor-made graphs. Some of the statements are contradicted by other reliable sources including those already cited in the article:

• The Martin–Quinn graph shows that, by the 1939 term, Roosevelt had moved the Court to a more liberal position by appointing four new justices including strong liberals Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, and Frank Murphy. Led by the increasingly conservative chief justices Harlan F. Stone and Fred M. Vinson, the Court shifted in a more conservative direction through the early 1950s.

• In the 1970s, the Court shifted in a more conservative direction when President Richard Nixon appointed Chief Justice Warren Burger and strong conservative justices Lewis Powell, William Rehnquist, and Harry Blackmun, and more so when President Ronald Reagan elevated Rehnquist to chief justice, although Blackmun became more liberal over time. The Court shifted to an even more conservative orientation when it was joined by strong conservative justices Antonin Scalia (appointed by President Ronald Reagan), Clarence Thomas (appointed by President George H. W. Bush), and Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts (both whom were appointed by President George W. Bush).

The value of describing the Burger Court as "more conservative" than the Warren Court, and Justice Blackmun as a "strong conservative" is dubious. Based on Ruger 2005 cited in the article Blackmun never lived up to the hype of being a conservative justice and began drifting "almost from the beginning of his tenure".

I agree that removing content without discussion is not ideal. Based on what I saw in the text I decided it would be better to remove the content until it is fixed. I was not trying to alter it in significant ways or discard major parts of it. The article title I changed to may have changed the article more dramatically than I thought or intended.

If there is other removed content that needs to be discussed please add it here. Antignomi (talk) 09:41, 29 July 2024 (UTC)

Before your major changes, you are right there were two sections about ideological shifts over time: the first described the methodology used to measure the changes over time, the second described the results of that analysis. These two sections could be combined but that would make for very long section that focused on two different things. It made sense to separate them.

The "Partisan balance" section describes a particular method for determining the ideology of members of the Court and also the overall orientation of the Court. It is a simple method and was used before more sophisticated statistical methods (like the Markov chain Monte Carlo Bayesian method) were developed, but it also relies on other information besides Court votes — the party of the president that appointed each justice. Since Supreme Court decisions are made in the context of actual cases, the votes cast by Justices often have muddled ideological implications that are very hard to capture in the vote coding. Also, which cases are decided is extremely important and very dependent on other factors. But analyzing votes can provide an indication of the ideological drift of individual justices. So using both methods provides a better understanding of the ideology of the individual justices as well as how that plays out in the Court decision-making.

You say: "Are you sure that it [partisan balance] is a "way of determining the ideological leanings of the justices"?" Here is what the article said in the first paragraph under the "Partisan balance" heading before you deleted it:

• In a 2000 paper, Segal, Timpone, and Howard found that, in their study area (civil liberties and economics cases from 1937 to 1994), presidents appear to be reasonably successful in extending their policy preferences by appointing like-minded justices to the court, though they found that justices appear to deviate over time away from the presidents who appointed them.

This is a strong study, cited by many others, that as far as I know, has not been challenged. So, to some extent, just looking at the party of the president who appointed a justice provides a good indication of the ideology of that justice during the study period. But, as that sentence says, there are several caveats about how good an indicator it is. Which is why it makes sense to have many additional methods that, together, provide a better picture. A list of the many methods that have been used, all of them helpful to some degree, can be found in the first sentence of the "Measuring ideological leanings" section.

As the fourth paragraph of that section says, it appears that since 2010, the ideological leanings of justices is even more highly correlated with the party of the appointing president than before. From all indications, since that Devins and Baum article was written in 2017, recent appointments have perpetuated that divide.

If you don't like the title of the article, then you could suggest (here in the Talk page) that it be changed and wait a few weeks for other people to weigh in on that change before you make a major change like that. The original title of the article was "Ideological Leanings of the Supreme Court of the United States" but this was changed since Courts don't have an ideology, only people do. Also, most of the methodologies focus on the ideological leanings of the individual justices, albeit within the context of a particular Supreme Court as they discuss and debate with other members of that Court and confer with their law clerks. One title you suggest, "Judicial ideology on the United States Supreme Court", might be an appropriate title though it is vague and it is somewhat difficult to know what it means.

The seats of the Associate Supreme Court justice seats have been numbered sequentially up through 10. Those removed were Seats 5 and 7 — removed when the justices who occupied those seats left. So there is still a Seat 10. You can learn why this is from this Wikipedia article: List of justices of the Supreme Court of the United States by seat and the links from it.

You are right that the "Ideological shifts since 1937" section is primarily a summary of the movement shown in the two graphs (and the data that underlies those graphs), pointing out the major trends, though it also draws on other Wikipedia pages and other cited sources. For example, the first sentence about the shift from the Four Horseman to the Three Musketeers can be found in the first sentence of the Wikipedia article Four Horsemen (Supreme Court) and all of the Wikipedia article Three Musketeers (Supreme Court). Note that both of these pages are cited in the article.

Was the Burger Court more conservative than the Warren Court: Yes, according to this Wikipedia article: Burger Court Here is the second sentence of that article:

• The Burger Court is generally considered to be the last liberal court to date. It has been described as a transitional court, due to its transition from having the liberal rulings of the Warren Court to the conservative rulings of the Rehnquist Court.

Later, under the "Judicial philosophy" section, it says:

• The large number of moderates on the court and the resulting decisions gave the court a paradoxical reputation for being both conservative and liberal.

So at first the Burger Court made some liberal decisions, but then it became more conservative over time as the justices changed and made more conservative decisions.

As the graphs show, when Blackmun joined the Burger Court he was considered a conservative (with a Segal-Cover ideological score of 0.115. As both the Martin-Quinn and Bailey graphs show, his early votes were on the conservative side (in 1969 a M-Q score of 1.459, Bailey score of 1.289) and moved steadily toward the liberal side (in 1993 a M-Q score of -1.940, Bailey score of -1.188). You can learn more about Blackmun from this page: Harry Blackmun.

You can also see from the graphs that Justice White moved the other way. He voted more liberal during the Warren Court than during the Burger Court. The graphs enable you to see the trends for individual justices and the Median Justice (in yellow) gives some indication (though certainly not definitive) of what the collective ideological bent of the Court was at any point. By this measure, there was a dramatic change in the Court in 1969 from liberal to moderate as Justice Burger replaced Justice Warren and Justice Blackmun replaced Justice Fortas. This change was further augmented when conservative Justice Powell replaced Justice Black in 1971. The change from Justice Harlan to Justice Rehnquist also appears to be a change from a conservative to a very strong conservative, adding to the conservative leaning of the Burger Court.

But note, again, that the method used to generate these graphs suffers from various limitations. So the graphs should not be be treated as definitive. They are just indications. The academic literature has dozens of papers describing these changes over the years. You could do a thorough research of that literature and add more citations if you wanted to.

I have returned the title of this article to the original and reverted the changes back to the July 1, 2024 revision. I also reverted the change you made to the SCOTUS template so it links once again to this page.

Before you make any major changes on a topic as complex and controversial as the ideological leanings of Supreme Court justices, please learn more about the topic. Also, please follow the guidelines for editing. And before moving an article, follow these guidelines. In particular, don't assert there are no citations when, in fact, there are. Don't make changes based on your opinions. Don't make controversial changes (especially article moves) quickly before others have a chance to know of your intentions and can respond. Try to reach a consensus before you make big or controversial changes. Randy Schutt (talk) 15:23, 29 July 2024 (UTC)

The title is fine with the unsourced content removed. Most of the problems are from that content.

Regarding the content what you are saying "the graphs show" is not what reliable sources are saying the graphs show. I don't believe that these sections were written based on published literature and only need citations to be added. I am leaving the title in place but removing that content until it is fixed and the citations are added. I checked Justice Blackmun's article and it does not contain the citations you are claiming, so I simply don't believe you at this point. It does not stay in the article without citations. 15:50, 29 July 2024 (UTC) Antignomi (talk) 15:50, 29 July 2024 (UTC)

I see that you first deleted two paragraphs describing the number of justices appointed by each President and then put them back (minus two sentences) and added several citations. It is not clear to me that the first two references you cited provide any more information than does the Wikipedia page List of justices of the Supreme Court of the United States already cited in the first paragraph. The Supreme Court webpage and the link to Franklin D. Roosevelt Supreme Court candidates both establish that Roosevelt did, indeed, appoint 8 justices to the Court (and promoted Harlan F. Stone to Chief Justice).

It is also not clear why you referenced two books (The Texture of Irish America and the Oxford Handbook of Public Choice, Volume 2) since they do not appear to have been written by Court scholars, nor to discuss the Court, but presumably if I owned those books I could look up the reference and see why they were included. Since the third book (The United States Supreme Court: The Pursuit of Justice) consists of 17 essays by Court historians, it would be helpful to cite the particular essay (and author) that provides backing. But again, it is not clear that these references are needed at all since the necessary information for these two paragraphs is already in the cited Wikipedia page List of justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. The only possibly controversial statement is the one you added: that Eisenhower did not intend the justices he appointed to make the liberal decisions that they did. And that is not very controversial.

As I said before, the rest of the paragraphs you deleted describing the ideological trends of Supreme Court justices are descriptions of the graphs (which are based on the data prepared by Martin-Quinn and Bailey, both of which are cited) as well as other cited sources. You say that the description is "not what reliable sources are saying" but you offer no reliable sources (in fact, no sources at all) that challenge any of these paragraphs. And you don't challenge any of the many sources that are cited.

You are correct that all of the sentences in one of the paragraphs that you deleted are not backed up by the Ruger citation. Ruger focuses specifically on Justice Blackmun and describes his voting trend over time, and Ruger relies on the Martin-Quinn research. Here is a key sentence showing this (at the top of page 1210): "Even in the first decade of his Supreme Court tenure, he [Blackmun] gradually moved from being a reliable vote usually aligned with Justices Burger and Rehnquist to a Justice much more likely to vote with Brennan and Marshall." The sentence is footnoted to Martin-Quinn. The exact trend information for Blackmun for every year he was on the Court is found in the Martin-Quinn and Bailey graphs/data (and is obviously true by looking at the graphs). This is true for the other justices described in that paragraph too. The trend for Seat 10 is obvious from looking at the graphs (or carefully studying the underlying data).

To be included, each part of a Wikipedia article should meet three criteria:

1. Provide useful information to the reader in helping provide understanding of some part of reality. Not everything needs to be said, but useful information should be included (and not removed).

2. Provide true information. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and it is only useful if it contains true information.

3. If statements are not obviously true (like "the sky is blue"), they should be substantiated by solid references so the reader can be assured that it is likely true. The best kind of substantiation is peer-reviewed academic papers from top journals. These have generally been thoroughly vetted by experts in the field who study these things intently so that they best represent humanity's understanding of that part of reality. There are, of course, situations in which researchers are sloppy in their methodology or when they actually fabricate data, but generally researchers are trying to do a good job and do so. Peer-reviewed academic papers provide the best way we have found to establish truth, especially when dealing with controversial topics and contested information. Most of the best pages on Wikipedia are built on this solid foundation.

When peer-reviewed articles are not available, other sources, such as US government reports, news reports from mainstream newspapers, magazines, and TV outlets, and books by reporters or other careful writers generally do a good job of providing that substantiation.

The paragraphs that you say do not have sufficient citations are, in fact, completely vetted by reference to other Wikipedia pages (which have also been vetted), to peer-reviewed academic papers, or to the other kinds of solid sources mentioned above.

Since you have provided no valid reason for removing these paragraphs, I am, once again, restoring the paragraphs that you have removed. Randy Schutt (talk) 15:23, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

The subject you are writing about is not "partisan balance". You are writing about the countermajoritarian difficulty and concordance - that is why it is in the book Oxford Handbook of Public Choice. That is what the paper Segal, Timpone, and Howard is about.

The unsourced changes you made to my revision made it wrong "President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed 5 justices, flipping the partisan balance". The preponderance of sources agree that Eisenhower did not appoint Warren or Brennan based on ideology and so did not "flip the partisan balance".

You seem to think that the Court was liberal under Roosevelt, then became conservative after Chief Justice Hughes was replaced by Harlan Stone.

You have repeatedly accused me of removing content inappropriately: "The paragraphs that you say do not have sufficient citations are, in fact, completely vetted by reference to other Wikipedia pages (which have also been vetted)"

But the content that you restored includes was:

"Led by the increasingly conservative chief justices Harlan F. Stone and Fred M. Vinson, the Court shifted in a more conservative direction through the early 1950s."

However, Harlan Stone died in 1946 (according to his Wikipedia article). And the Wikipedia articles you are using as references identify him as "liberal" and not "increasingly conservative".

I removed this unsourced content because it is not possible to provide reliable sources for it. Your explanations had shed light on the flaws in reasoning that resulted in changes to content that you are saying were "completely vetted by reference to other Wikipedia pages".

Please undo your unsourced changes or add citations to the content.

Antignomi (talk) 16:47, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

Article scope

I'm not impressed by what I've seen on this talk page so far. The discussion is getting out of hand.

What I am currently doing:

• I am rewriting "Partisan balance" following Oxford Handbooks "Partisan based measures" and other reliable sources, including the ones that were already cited in the article.
• I am not removing any of the sources currently in the article. If this changes for some reason, I will explain why the source was removed on the talk page.
• I am going to restore the section about "Ideological shifts since 1937" once it is rewritten with reliable sources.

I do think the article is about more than "Measuring judicial ideologies". But the removed content is very disputed and should not be restored again without reliable sources. It should be rewritten attention to chronologies and detail and yes, reliable sources are your friend. Please use them. That is what I will be doing. Antignomi (talk) 17:54, 30 July 2024 (UTC)