Author(s)

Daniel G. Klemonski, Oliver K. Natarajan, Samuel H. Studnitzer, Paul M. Sommers^*

Department of Economics, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT, USA.

The purpose of this paper is to assess ideological change of Supreme Court justices from 1937 to 2015. Using Martin-Quinn scores, we find that for most four-year presidential terms, Democratic president Court appointees are more liberal and Republican president appointees are more conservative. Yet among justices with a minimum tenure of seven years, simple bilinear regression on a time trend variable shows that ten of eighteen justices appointed by Republican presidents have drifted to the left, while seven of sixteen justices appointed by Democratic presidents have drifted to the right. We conclude that ideological drift among justices, especially in a direction contrary to what the appointing president might have predicted, appears to be more common than exceptional.

Supreme Court Justices, Martin-Quinn Scores, Regression

Klemonski, D. , Natarajan, O. , Studnitzer, S. and Sommers, P. (2017) Ideological Reversal among Supreme Court Justices. Open Journal of Social Sciences, 5, 290-299. doi: 10.4236/jss.2017.57018.