Study Labels Thomas Most Partisan Justice, Scalia Most Activist
A law professor’s study of court decisions concludes that Justice Clarence Thomas is the U.S. Supreme Court’s most partisan justice, and Justice Antonin Scalia is the most activist.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy is most neutral, and Justice Stephen G. Breyer shows the most judicial restraint, law professor Cass Sunstein writes in the Washington Independent.
Sunstein, a University of Chicago law professor joining Harvard this fall, scoured and catalogued 20,000 federal court decisions with several colleagues. They analyzed whether court decisions reviewing agency decisions were liberal or conservative and how often courts struck down agency decisions.
The study authors labeled an agency decision as conservative if it was challenged by a public-interest group, like the Sierra Club. If it was challenged by a corporation, like General Motors, it was counted as liberal.
Decisions by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr. were not included in the study since they are relatively new to the court.
The study shows that partisan voting is also pervasive on the lower federal courts. Republican judicial appointees are far more likely to uphold conservative agency decisions than Democratic appointees; and Democratic appointees are more likely to uphold liberal agency decisions.
The results lead Sunstein to conclude that “widespread conservative complaints about ‘liberal judicial activism’ should be taken with many grains of salt.”
