I have always wanted to get this one off my chest...

I remember reading an article in USA Today about the Supreme Court, with the usual inferential statements about the "converative" court, the possiblity that Roe would be overturned, etc. Interestingly though they supplied the years key decisions, so I thought this would be a good time to put the hypothesis to a test. How can one know if the court is conservative or liberal? Was the so-called conservative court a monolithic entity with the conservatives voting in lockstep?

The full data I'll post on my web site shortly. Just as a reminder, the justices were:
Rehnquist
Stevens
Oconnor
Scalia
Kennedy
Souter
Thomas
Ginsburg
Breyer

All I did was look to see who voted with whom. I assumed that one can safely say that Thomas, Scalia, and Rehnquist were "conservatives", Ginsburg, Stevens and Souter were "liberals", and the Breyer, Oconner and Kennedy were swing voters. The conventional wisdom was that Oconner and Kennedy were generally conservative, and that the conservative block voted together (I remember in particular that Thomas was not an independent thinker, and was a Scalia clone).

The cases were

Rasul vs Vush

Hamdi vs Rumsfeld, Part 1

Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld Part 2

Rumsfeld vs. Padilla

McConnell vs. Federal Electgion Commission

Ashcroft vs. ACLU

Eld Grove Unified School District vs. Newdow

Locke vs. Davey

Blakely vs. Washington

Missouri vs. Seibert

United States vs. Patane

Hiibel vs. th Judicial District of Nevada

Cheney vs. US District Court for the District of Columbia

Tennessee v s. Lane

Aetna Health Inc. vs. Davila

Alaska Dept. of Environmenta Conservation vs. EPA

National Archives and Records Administration vs. Favish

Veith vs. Jubelirer

Republic of Austria vs. Altmann

Here's what I found:

1) the voting block, those who voted in lockstep, were the liberals. In these cases, Souter and Ginsburg always agreed, while Souter and Stevens (and obvoiusly Ginsburg and Stevens) agreed in 18 of 19 cases. Stevens and Breyer agreed in 16 of 19 cases (84% of the time). So these 4 justices voted in virtual lockstep. Here are the top agreement pairs (with abbreviated names--hopefully not needing further clarification)

Pair	Agreement
So-G	100.0%
St-So	94.7%
St-G	94.7%
St-B	84.2%
R-K	84.2%
So-B	78.9%
R-T	78.9%
G-B	78.9%
Sc-T	73.7%
R-Sc	73.7%
R-O	73.7%
O-B	73.7%
K-Th	73.7%
O-K	68.4%
St-O	57.9%
Sc-K	57.9%
O-Sc	57.9%
O-T	52.6%
O-So	52.6%
O-G	52.6%
K-B	52.6%

Those that disagreed the most were Thomas/Rehnquist vs. the liberal 3 (Ginsburg, Souter, Breyer).


2) Who won (i.e. who was in the majority most often)? Here's that breakdown:

Name	In Majority
Oconnor	16
Stevens	14
Kennedy	14
Souter	13
Ginsburg	13
Breyer	13
Rehnquist	11
Thomas	11
Scalia	10

Oconnor (no surprise) was on the winning side the most--the big swing voter. What I found interesting though was that Stevens was next along with Kennedy. In fact, Scalia, Thomas, and Rehnquist, the conservatives, were at the bottom of the list. So clearly this wasn't a very conservative court. If anything, I'd say this was a slightly left-of-center court; the key liberals (Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer) won more often than the key conservatives (Rehnquist, Thomas, and Scalia). So I conclude that the hype of the media that this court was so conservative (and there did such things as through the election for Bush) is just unfounded by the data.

I'd love to do this again for the 2004-2005 and 2005-2006 dockets if I can find the data. Clearly the court has become more conservative, but by how much? Once again, the best way to answer that is with the data....