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Notes -
Statistical Structure of the Supreme Court
Inspired by earlier discussion on The Motte, I decided to statistically investigate the voting patterns of the Supreme Court.
The obvious place to start is by looking at how frequently each justice's opinions aligned with each other's. We can interpret the percent-of-times-disagreed as a measure of how "far apart" justices are. We can then use a variety of approaches to plot this onto a 2d graph (e.g. using sklearn.manifold.MDS)
I found data from back when Breyer was on the Court rather than Jackson. My preferred model results is this graph and fairly consistent with @Walterodim's characterization:
Finally, he characterizes Gorsuch as a "Maverick", which is admittedly a little hard to formalize in a 2d projection of a high-dimensional space, and the model just spits him out between Barrett and Thomas.
My expectation is that Jackson's jurisprudence will be most similar to Sotomayor's on the current Court, though with the usual caveat that this is a condensed model, and even justices that are close to each other will still come down on opposite sides of some cases. This sort of left-to-right mapping tends to be most predictive in high-profile cases where the issue is graspable by non-lawyers, but more obscure areas can produce lineups that appear to be almost random.
It's also important to note that the most common lineup has not changed--it is still 9-0.
One thing of note here from the perspective of a relatively new court observer (and profound legal naïf) is that it doesn't really take all that long to immerse oneself and understand the different philosophies that result in different breakdowns. Due to some combination of naïveté and cynicism, I often find myself rolling my eyes and thinking that their reasoning is obviously bullshit and that complexity in law and both intentional and fake, but it's not like it actually requires a decade of education to understand what they're getting at if you just read the decisions. If nothing else, SCOTUS does a good job making sure that their writings are intelligible to anyone that's motivated to spend some time reading them.
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This is 9-0 think is actually more impressive than it sounds. The SCOTUS only wants to take a case if it needs to clean up some mess from the lower courts. So imagine you are some very high ranking appellate judge, and you make your decision only to find that every judge on the SCOTUS rules against you. You can't pretend that you made some politically controversial decision.
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