(cross-posted on politicalmammal.com).
In December, I received a message from a clerk at the Supreme Court asking whether I could customize our Visual History of the Supreme Court as a present for a Justice. I was happy to do so, and delivered a special version to him in time for the holidays. Because of this, I recently got a chance to take a private tour of the Court. To be honest, my main curiosity about the Court building was not about the room where the Justices hear the arguments. I had had the good fortune of watching my brother-in-law argue a case there some years ago. Rather, I was really interested in seeing something I had read about, the basketball court on the top floor of the building. I really wanted a chance to take a shot at one of the hoops up there.

So I waited patiently through the mundane aspects of the tour, the marble, the statuary, the special chairs for the president and other visiting dignitaries, the decorated ceilings, the beautiful law library rendered somewhat obsolete by computers, the symbolic carvings, the portraits of former justices, and all the fancy rooms and corridors. The clerk was very poised and knowledgeable and I imagined him as a judge or elected official down the road. It was nice to see that my posters were still on sale at the gift shop. I asked the clerk how the court would rule on the constitutionality of the Affordable Health Care Act, but he gave me no indication. He did say that the Justice was very happy with the print and that they had framed it nicely.

Finally we arrived at the basketball court, next to a weight room on the far less elegant, comparatively grungy top level of the building, and I felt more at home. Without seeking formal permission, I sought out a loose basketball, headed to the free throw line, and, though wearing my down coat, I took a shot.

I had years of preparation for that moment. I had often stayed after school in 2nd grade to play basketball on the cracked concrete court at Flatirons Elementary school in Boulder, Colorado. I played countless hours of one on one with my brother and three-on-three with the neighbor kids at the backyard court up my alley on 10th Street. As far as I know, I still hold the season record for highest free-throw shooting percentage in the after-school basketball league at my elementary school (9/12 or 75%). We had some makeshift hoops over the years in Vermont as well. And clutch free-throw shooting is apparently a family tradition. I remember my dad telling me that he won a free-throw shooting contest at his Brooklyn high school. My basketball preparation also included being a substitute my junior high school team and intramural play in high school, college, and graduate school, not to mention playing Sunday morning to this day with a fine group of increasingly long-in-the-tooth guys. Unfortunately I’ve been really struggling with my shot lately.

Anyhow, despite the intense pressure of the moment, I swished my shot.

My friend Mark, who accompanied me on the tour, is my witness.

So I now have a real claim to fame. A perfect shooting percentage at “the highest court in the land.”

Our Timeplot of the history of the Supreme Court features 53 landmark cases from the beginning of the Court to present day. For each case, we indicate how each of the justices on the Court at the time voted. As one of our reviewers noted, choosing that list of cases is a fairly subjective process, but makes for a pretty good parlor game.

So how did we decide which cases to include? We consulted a variety of lists of landmark cases published by various academic and historical institutions, and we consulted with a number of serious students of the Court—people like lawyers, professors of law, and political scientists specializing in American history.

Some more prominent cases, like Marbury v. Madison, Dred Scott, or Roe v. Wade, would likely make anyone’s list of the top fifty or so. Others are more debatable. How would you have revised the list? Leave us your comments.

As we were creating our Timeplot of the history of the Supreme Court, we wanted to clearly display the influence of each U.S. president on the Court in an objective, non-partisan manner. To do this, we chose to measure influence by comparing the number of each president’s “justice days”—in other words, measuring how many days an appointed justice served (or in the case of recently-appointed justices, are predicted to serve) on the Court.

We created semicircle “bubbles” aligned to each president’s spot on the timeline and sized to each president’s total number of “justice days.”

Each half circle is colored by the president’s political party, so that it’s apparent at a quick glance that a few presidents have had an outsized ideological influence, at least by our objective measure. George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan have clearly outsized semicircles, indicating a high amount of influence on the Supreme Court of their day.

Of course, establishing a clear correlation between simply appointing justices and significantly affecting the Court’s ideology is tricky business—as Eisenhower’s appointments of the liberal Justices Warren and Brennan demonstrate, after being appointed to a lifetime term, a justice will not necessarily reflect the political preferences of the appointing president.

The Supreme Court Timeplot incorporates a small feature that might be easily lost amongst the large amount of data in the chart: Next to their names on the lists on either side of the Timeplot, we have starred (*) the ten justices who we consider “most notable.”

This is quite a subjective consideration, so I thought I might say a few words on how we came to develop our list.

We consulted multiple academic sources which rate or rank the justices (there have been quite a number of surveys of scholars and practitioners).

Then we proposed our own list of ten, and sent it to our reviewers—they suggested one change, which we incorporated.

The top ten in the current version of the Timeplot are Marshall, Story, the first Harlan, Holmes, Hughes, Brandeis, Black, Frankfurter, Warren, Brennan. Would you revise that list? Why? Leave us your comments.

The Supreme Court chart visualizes the timelines of justices on the Court as a river, flowing up when there are more appointees by Republican presidents and flowing down with more Democratic appointees. (We take significant liberties with justices before the establishment of those two parties, aligning Democratic-Republicans with Democrats and aligning Whigs and Federalists with Republicans.)

We know that many current observers view the progression of the Court through a partisan lens, assuming that Republicans aim to make a more conservative Court while Democrats seek to appoint more liberal members.

Ideology has always played a role in appointments, but our research proved that history is messy. We did not have an external measure of Court ideology that ran the whole period, but we did include as an inset a measure from 1939 to present day.

It is certainly interesting to note that the Court has at times had nine Democratic appointees or nine Republican appointees, but that the most liberal and most conservative landmark decisions do not necessarily correspond with those periods. We think the demonstrated variation over time in partisanship on the Supreme Court is a compelling component of our Timeplot. What do you think? How would you revise this for future versions of this Timeplot? Leave your comments.