On the perils of drawing inferences about supreme court justices from their first few years of service

Judicature

Volumn 91, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 168-179

  Epstein, Lee ^b   Quinn, Kevin ^c   Martin, Andrew D ^a,d   Segal, Jeffrey A ^e  

^a WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW   (United States)

^b NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^c HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^d WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^e STONY BROOK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 41849104186     PISSN: 00225800     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (72)

1. Erwin Chemerinsky, The Kennedy Court: October Term 2005, 9 GREEN BAG 335, at 346 (2006). Our emphasis.
2. Timothy Hagle, Freshman Effects for Supreme Court Justices, 37 AM. J. POL. SCI. 1142 (1993).
3. Charles R. Shipan, Acclimation Effects Revisited, 40 JURIMETRICS J. 243 (2000).
4. Id.
5. Sandra L.Wood, et al., Acclimation Effects' for Supreme Court Justices: A Cross-Validation, 1888-1940," 42 AM. J. POL. SCI 690 (1998).
6. See, e.g., Mark S. Hurwitz and Joseph V. Stefko, Acclimation and Attitudes: 'Newcomer' Justices and Precedent Conformance on the Supreme Court, 57 POL. RES. Q. 121 (2004).
7. Lee Epstein, Andrew D. Martin, Kevin Quinn, and Jeffrey Segal, Ideological Drift on the U.S. Supreme Court, 101 NW. U. L. REV. 1483 (2007).
8. Id.
9. George Lee Haskins, FOUNDATION OF POWER: JOHN MARSHALL, 1805-15. VOL. II OF HISTORY OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES 152. (New York; Macmillan, 1982).
10. James J. Kilpatrick, High Court: Proof the System Works, Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1972, at F6.
11. Charles M. Haar and Jerald S. Kayden, Private Property vs. Public Use, New York Times, July 29, 1987, at 23A.
12. Quoted in Steve Daley, Friends, Foes Hunting Thomas' 'Paper Trail', Chicago Tribune, July 4, 1991, at 1.
13. Quoted in Joseph Tybor and Glen Elsasser, Judging Rehnquist's Court, Chicago Tribune, July 3, 1988, at 1.
14. See, e.g., Stuart Taylor, High Court Rulings Hint Move to Right, New York Times, July 3, 1988, at 1;
15. Lyle Denniston, This Term, Suprime Court Had New Look, St. Petersburg Times, July 3, 1988, at 1A.
16. Jan Crawford Greenburg, SUPREME CONFLICT: THE INSIDE STORY OF THE STRUGGLE FOR CONTROL OF THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT (New York: Penguin Press, 2007).
17. Linda Greenhouse, The Conservative Majority Solidifies, New York Times, June 30, 1991, at 1, Sec. 4.
18. Quoted in Jeffrey T. Leeds, A Life on the Court, New York Times, October 5, 1986 (Sunday magazine). Our emphasis.
19. Elois Snyder, The Supreme Court as a Small Group, 36 SOC. FORCES 232 (1958).
20. See also J, Wood-ford Howard, Justice Murphy: The Freshman Years, 18 VAND. L. REV. 473 (1968);
21. John D. Sprague, VOTING PATTERNS OF THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT: CASES IN FEDERALISM, 1889-1959 (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968).
22. See, e.g., Terry Bowen, Consensual Norms and the Freshman Effect on the United States Supreme Court, 76 SOC. SCI. Q. 222 (1995);
23. John M. Scheb and Lee W. Ailshie, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and the Freshman Effect, 69 JUDICATURE 9 (1985);
24. Thea F. Rubin and Albert P, Melone, Justice Antonin Scalia: A First Year Freshman Effect?, 72 JUDICATURE 98 (1988);
25. Albert P. Melone, Revisiting the Freshman Effect Hypothesis: The First Two Terms of Anthony Kennedy, 74 JUDICATURE 6 (1990);
26. Wood et al., supra n. 5;
27. Hurwitz and Stefko, supra n. 6;
28. Shipan, supra n. 3;
29. Hagle, supra n.2.
30. To determine if new justices exhibit acclimation or newcomer effects, scholars have looked at a wide range of behavior (e.g., opinion writing, bloc formation, and adherence to stare decisis). While interesting, our emphasis here is on voting behavior, as it is in most contemporary studies
31. For literature reviews, see, e.g., Hagle, supra n. 2;
32. Shipan, supra n. 3;
33. Hurwitz and Stefko, supra n. 6;
34. Christopher F. Smith and S. Thomas Read, The Performance and Effectiveness of New Appointees to the Rehnquist Court, 20 OHIO N. U. L. REV. 205 (1993).
35. See, e.g., Hagle, supran. 2;
36. Shipan, supra n. 3.
37. See, e.g., Hagle, supra n. 2;
38. Wood, supra n. 5.
39. Actually, given that the percentages displayed in Figure 1 fail to control for changes in case content (i.e., changes in issue or case stimuli), this conclusion may not hold. We return to this point shortly.
40. We are not the first to recognize this problem. For a review of previous efforts to deal with it, along with their inadequacies, see Shipan, supra n, 3.
41. See, e.g., Harold Spaeth, The Attitudinal Model, in Lee Epstein (ed.) CONTEMPLATING COURTS. (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 1995);
42. Lawrence Baum, Measuring Policy Change on the United States Supreme Court, 82 AM. POL. SCI. REV. 905 (1988).
43. Greenhouse, supra n. 16.
44. Some scholars, most notably Segal, have developed area-specific solutions; in Segal's case, Fourth Amendment search and seizure litigation. See Jeffrey Segal, Measuring Change on the Supreme Court: Examining Alternative Models, 29 AM. J. POL. SCI. 461 (1985). But we know of no work that satisfactorily tackles the problem across the range of legal areas.
45. The Martin-Quinn scores, though theoretically unbounded, range from about -6 (Douglas) on the left to about +4 (Thomas) on the right. Across all justices in all terms, the standard deviation of the scores is approximately 2.
46. Andrew D. Martin and Kevin Quinn, Dynamic Ideal Point Estimation via Markov Chain Monte Carlo for the U.S. Supreme Court, 1953-1999, 10 POL. ANALYSIS 134 (2002).
47. See, e.g., Martin and Quinn,
48. id.;
49. Andrew D. Martin, Kevin Quinn and Lee Epstein, The Median Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, N. CAR. L. REV. 1275 (2005);
50. Epstein et al., supra n. 7.
51. See, e.g., Theodore W. Ruger, Justice Harry Blackmun and the Phenomenon of Judicial Preference Change, 70 MO. L. REV. 1209 (2005);
52. Barry Friedman and Anna L. Harvey, Electing the Supreme Court, 78 IND. L. J. 123 (2005);
53. Paul Wahlbeck, The Chief Justice and the Institutional Judiciary: Strategy and Constraints on Supreme Court Opinion Assignment, 154 U. PA. L. REV. 1729 (2006).
54. Epstein, et al. supra n. 7.
55. Because the ideal points are continuous, the probability that any two ideal points will be exactly equal is 0. Thus, 1 minus the probability that a justice's revealed preferences are more conservative at some later time is exactly equal to the probability that the justice's later preferences are more liberal. Put another way, knowing the probability of a move to the right allows one to easily calculate the probability of a move to the left.
56. In other words, we use the first term as our primary baseline. For more on question of the appropriate baseline, see Hagle, supra n. 2.
57. As we describe in previous work, generating these posterior probabilities presents no major difficulties. It is simply a matter of calculating the fraction of samples generated by the M-Q procedures for which the justice's ideal point in later terms was to the right of the baseline value, the first term. See Epstein, et al., supra n. 7;
58. Andrew D. Martin and Kevin Quinn, Assessing Preference Change on the U.S. Supreme Court, 23 J. L. ECON. & ORG. 365 (2007).
59. See, e.g., Ruger, supra n. 32;
60. Linda Greenhouse, BECOMING JUSTICE BLACKMUN: HARRY BLACKMUN'S SUPREME COURT JOURNEY (New York: Holt, 2005).
61. Murphy and Burger are the only two justices, who, even under the conventional test, show no signs of voting instability. That is, a comparison of their first-year ideal point estimate and the mean of their remaining terms reveals no statistically significant difference. We cannot say the same for any other justice in our database, including Stewart and Kennedy.
62. See id.
63. We derive these cut points using the Quinn-Martin method. Under their approach, the data and modeling assumptions determine the joint distribution of the ideal points and the cut points. While this joint distribution is large and complex, it is possible to use the conditional distributions of the ideal points - given the cut points - and the cut points - given the ideal points - to fit the model. For more details, see Quinn and Martin, supra n. 36;
64. Epstein, et al., supra n. 7.
65. We derive the figure of 1,937 from the July 2007 release of Harold J. Spaeth's U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Database, with analu=0 and dec type=1, 6, or 7.
66. We could probably say the same of other extremists who grew only more extreme over time (e.g., Brennan and Marshall). For these justices, as for Scalia, their ideological transformations, from liberals (conservatives) in their first year to more extreme liberals (conservatives) in later terms, likely failed to translate into consequential doctrinal change.
67. Quoted in Daley, supra n. 12.
68. Martin, Quinn and Epstein, supra n. 31.
69. Hagle, supra n. 2.
70. According to Martin and Quinn's estimates (available at: http://mqscores.wustl.edu/) both Alito and Roberts are to the right of the Court's median, Justice Kennedy.
71. Michael Dorf, Does Federal Executive Branch Experience Explain Why Some Republican Supreme Court Justices 'Evolve' and Others Don't, HARV. L. & POL'Y REV., forthcoming (2007).
72. Lawrence Baum, JUDGES AND THEIR AUDIENCES: A PERSPECTIVE ON JUDICIAL BEHAVIOR (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).