Empirical SCOTUS by Dr. Adam Feldman on September 10, 2019
This is going to be a big year in front of the Supreme Court. Likely with more fireworks than the last few. Since Justice Scalia passed away during the 2015 Supreme Court Term, the Court has been in an adjustment period. There was the long stint without a ninth justice. Justice Gorsuch was finally confirmed at the tail end of the 2016 term. At the end of his first full term in 2017 Justice Kennedy announced his retirement. This past term was Kavanaugh’s first term on the Court.
Justices are often prone to agreement with other justices during their first term on the Court leading to a high frequency in the majority (Kavanaugh had the highest frequency in the majority of the justices last term at 88%) and they begin to develop their own pattern of voting in subsequent terms. The consensual norm in a justice’s first year is known as the “freshman effect.†Research from Professor Lee Epstein and others has shown how justices’ preferences change over time.
Now that Kavanaugh is in his second term on the Court and the justices have begun to establish new voting relationships with one another we might expect more coalition voting among the justices. As it was last term, the more conservative justices voted together in seven 5-4 decisions and the liberal justices voted together in the majority of ten 5-4 decisions. One major shift this term from last is in the tenor of the cases the Court has granted. While the Court heard some noteworthy cases last term and perhaps one of its most profound decisions in years with Rucho v. Common Cause, the Court’s overall docket was far from electrifying. That is likely to change this term with cases dealing with issues ranging from Second Amendment rights, to the legality of DACA and other immigration rights, to cases dealing with employment discrimination based on sexual orientation. Based on the justices past decisions in cases dealing with similar issues, we might expect them to diverge along ideological lines in these cases as well as in many others.
Major Issues
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https://empiricalscotus.com/2019/09/10/a-new-term/
