Visualizing U.S. Supreme Court ideology

The Ideological History of the Supreme Court, 1937-2007, is a nice visualization designed by Alex Lundry that uses scores developed by two political scientists to measure where the justices have stood on an “ideological continuum” from liberal to conservative. You can download the visualization in spreadsheet form, play with it and see how it was done. Boiling a judge’s judicial philosophy down to a score is a tricky business, and not everyone likes it. You can get a flavor of that by reading The Distorting Slant of Quantitative Studies of Judging, by a law professor.

 

[via InfoAesthetics]