60 minutes Justice Thomas parody and remix by LegalBob
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Supreme Court Justice Tree Chart
How to use this chart: This chart is called a Tree Chart. Similar to a tree the chart starts with a trunk titled “Ideology”, then separates into seven individual branches titled taxes, federalism, unions, equal rights, economic, 1st amendment and criminal law. The size of each branch represents the amount of supporting votes from individual Supreme Court justices. The trunk alone gives intriguing data.
Example One: Which category has the least conflict among the chosen Supreme Court justices? Which category has the most conflict among justices?
When you think of clashes between liberal and conservative, many think federal taxes have the greatest disagreement. Outside of the Court maybe, but according to the Supreme Court Database, criminal law has twice the conflict.
Each branch connects to branches as well. Left click to zoom into a box and right click to zoom out. ZOOM OUT DOES NOT WORK WITH MAC'S. You will have to reload the page to start the graph again.
All data from www.SupremeCourtDataBase.org
Start with “Pro Equal Rights”.
Compare Justices Alito’s and Robert’s support for equal rights to Justices Rehnquist and Scalia.
Compare these four justices with Justice Thomas—what do you notice?
From this data what can you infer?
Next “RIGHT CLICK” anywhere on the chart. This will zoom out and return to the original seven categories.
Compare these 5 justices to criminal law.
Are you starting to see their political personalities?
Example two:
The conservative with the most support on the civil rights branch is Justice Alito.
The conservative with the least support to criminal law is Justice Alito.
What can you infer about Justice Alito? Is he a conservative? Not really—he fits much closer to that of a Libertarian.
In Robinson v. City of Pittsburg 1997, Alito argued a woman police officer could not use the Equal Protection clause to protect her in a sexual harassment suit. However under Title VII she could. In this case and many others, his support for less state power and less federal power has leaned towards more civil rights and less laws on criminals.
What other interesting caparisons did you find in this chart? Any chart fixes or ideas?
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Supreme Court Motion Chart
How the Supreme Court Justices changed from presidential expectations during their first 10 years on the bench.
How to use the motion chart: This first chart is a MOTION bubble chart. This type of chart includes not just two X and Y variables, but also a third variable--TIME! These types of charts do wonders for simplifying complex data. Here you see 28 Supreme Court Justices lined horizontally according to Liberal-Conservative ideology. They are then lined vertically according to the degree of change from the nominating presidents’ original expectations. When you press play, the bubbles will move according to the degree of change. You can then switch to bar chart if you prefer. I also recommend testing out different axes, for example, to compare only Presidents’ view on both axes, or only ideology view on both axes.
Problems with coding: The line chart will likely crash, and the check box that says "show trails" will likely go very slow. These graphs also have minor glitches when used on Mac's. Aside from the improved program coding, the motion graph is still impressive.
Here is an example: Click on Justice Warren. (It is important that you UN-CHECK "show trails"). You will notice when both axes are ideology, the change is large. Yet when you set bot axes to presidents change ?, the change is massive. This is because president Eisenhower is Republican and his nomination of Justice Warren ended up becoming very liberal. Eisenhower said nominating Warren was "The biggest damned-fool mistake I ever made."
Most of the data used to make this chart comes from www.supremecourtdatabase.org
Created this chart with Java Code, Flash & Google Code.
How to use the motion chart: This first chart is a MOTION bubble chart. This type of chart includes not just two X and Y variables, but also a third variable--TIME! These types of charts do wonders for simplifying complex data. Here you see 28 Supreme Court Justices lined horizontally according to Liberal-Conservative ideology. They are then lined vertically according to the degree of change from the nominating presidents’ original expectations. When you press play, the bubbles will move according to the degree of change. You can then switch to bar chart if you prefer. I also recommend testing out different axes, for example, to compare only Presidents’ view on both axes, or only ideology view on both axes.
Problems with coding: The line chart will likely crash, and the check box that says "show trails" will likely go very slow. These graphs also have minor glitches when used on Mac's. Aside from the improved program coding, the motion graph is still impressive.
Here is an example: Click on Justice Warren. (It is important that you UN-CHECK "show trails"). You will notice when both axes are ideology, the change is large. Yet when you set bot axes to presidents change ?, the change is massive. This is because president Eisenhower is Republican and his nomination of Justice Warren ended up becoming very liberal. Eisenhower said nominating Warren was "The biggest damned-fool mistake I ever made."
Most of the data used to make this chart comes from www.supremecourtdatabase.org
Created this chart with Java Code, Flash & Google Code.
This Chart does not work with un-jailbroken iPad's :-(
Video introducing 10 year court motion chart. UPDATED with HD VIDEO
How the Supreme Court Justices changed from presidential expectations during their first 10 years on the bench.
Interactive Motion Chart. Try it for your self below!
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Intense Supreme Court Charting
First chart comes from tedious inputting of ideology scores according to www.SupremCourtDatabase.org
As you can see the first chart makes little sense. Why are conservatives separated from each other?
After a much longer tedious process of trial and error, I reached my epiphany moment with the chart above!
A few versions of this graph. It indicates family wealth and religions and political party have minor similarities among justices. The biggest correlation is that political party and religion are directly correlated. To most people this may be uninteresting, so I am not going to attempt to explain much more of this in this post.
