For those who worry about SCOTUS becoming more and more conservative as Neil Gorsuch, IJ, joins the court, the news from Empirical SCOTUS is not what you may expect to hear:
Gorsuch joined the Court at a unique time. While there is much discussion about how this Court could be the moving towards the right, especially if Justice Kennedy (or any of the more liberal justices) retires with a Republican President at the helm, other statistics show the Court at the present is actually more ideologically liberal than it has been in years. According to the Martin-Quinn (MQ) Scores, the ideological metric commonly used to measure the relative positions of Supreme Court justices, at the end of last term the Court was the only one in recent memory with five primarily liberal justices and four predominately conservative justices (scores greater than zero denote conservatives while less than zero denote liberals). The justices scores at the end of the 2016 term, Gorsuch’s first partial term on the Court, look as follows:
Source: Empirical SCOTUS
It’s interesting that Kennedy is inclining towards the liberal side of the spectrum, although of course the entire political spectrum analogy sometimes is a poor measurement of any single person, and in his case a poor predictor of future performance.
But for pure surprise, my money is on Roberts. He’s the guy with the biggest sense of legacy, and thus most likely to ignore expectations.
