Talk:Ideological leanings of United States Supreme Court justices

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moderate liberal justices appointed by Democrats[edit]

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)[reply]

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

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)[reply]

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