Monday, October 5, 2015

FiveThirtyEight, Supreme Court Justices Get More Liberal As They Get Older:

There’s an old saw, often mistakenly attributed to Winston Churchill, that goes something like this: “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative when you’re 35, you have no brain.” A person should start left and drift right, and not the other way around, the adage suggests.

But when it comes to Supreme Court justices, growing older appears to incite a trend in the opposite ideological direction. One prominent measure of judicial ideology — the Martin-Quinn score — illustrates this tendency. ...

The current nine justices haven’t been shielded from these westward winds....

Why might this happen? What forces act upon a justice as he or she ages on the bench? Here are a few theories that emerged after I poked around and talked to some experts:

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/10/supreme-court-justices-get-more-liberal-as-they-get-older.html