The Consistency of Federalist Society-Affiliated U.S. Supreme Court Justices

• In Event: Reconsidering Justice Preferences and Goals on the US Supreme Court

Abstract

In recent terms, the U.S. Supreme Court has undergone a dramatic shift to the right. This has resulted in the Court fundamentally reshaping civil rights and liberties in America, in areas like reproductive autonomy, the Second Amendment, voting rights, and more. This paper investigates one potential reason for this shift: the increasingly prominent role of the Federalist Society in the conservative legal movement. We argue that, not only are Federalist Society-affiliated justices more conservative than their counterparts (both conservative and liberal), they are also more consistently conservative. This means that they are less likely than other justices to ideologically drift, resulting not only in the establishment of conservative precedents, but also greater adherence to conservative principles over time. We subject this hypothesis to empirical scrutiny by examining the decision making behavior of justices from 1946-2022, using empirical methods that allow us to focus on the consistency of judicial decision making. Preliminary results indicate support for our hypothesis, indicating that Federalist Society-affiliated justices vote more conservatively than other justices and do so more consistently. This paper therefore helps shed light on the role of the Federalist Society in the conservative legal movement, how it has been able to achieve its goals in ways not conceptualized by prior work on the subject, and judicial decision making more generally.

Authors

• Tim Komatsu, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Paul M. Collins, University of Massachusetts, Amherst