High Court Conservatives More to the Right than Those Before Them, Study Says
The U.S .Supreme Court’s conservatives are more decidedly to the right than the liberals are to the left, a recent study has found.
Four out of five of the Supreme Court’s most conservative justices since the New Deal are currently on the Supreme Court, according to the study done last year. They are Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr., the New York Times reports. The other justice in the top five, out of 43 justices since 1937, was former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist.
The study examined justices’ votes on issues such as criminal procedure, civil rights and the First Amendment, the New York Times explains. Thomas was the most conservative justice, the study found, and the late Thurgood Marshall was the most liberal. The court’s most liberal current justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “barely makes the Top 10 in the full tally,” according to the Times account.
The study authors are Judge Richard Posner of the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and law and economics professor William Landes of the University of Chicago. The Times summarized the study and talked to law professors who agreed that the court’s liberals aren’t as far to the left as its conservatives are to the right.
One of them is University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone. “The right side is very bold and very conservative,” he told the Times. “The liberal side is not bold. They are incrementalists. They don’t set the agenda.”
He suggested that Barack Obama could stir things up if he gets the chance to make an appointment. “A really powerful, articulate, moral, passionate voice on the left,” Stone told the Times, “would really change the dynamic on the court.”
