"The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good behaviour, and shall, at stated times, receive for their services, a compensation, which shall not be diminished during their continuance in office."
- U.S. Constitution, Article 3, Section 1
The United States Supreme Court can be, too often, a mysterious and opaque force in the U.S. government. Consisting of nine justices — appointed by the president, confirmed by congress, and given lifelong terms — it has judicial power over every case in the U.S. Its decisions, guided by the ideologies of the justices, set precedents that all other courts must follow. And the Supreme Court alone has the power to declare laws and statutes unconstitutional.
As a result, the Supreme Court is a powerful force of policy in the United States. The cases it decides have wide-ranging repercussions not just for the Judicial branch and the other branches of government, but for everyday American citizens. Cases like Roe v. Wade allowed for legal abortions and Brown v. Board of Education provided for the ending of racial segregation, while Korematsu v. United States legitimized the internment of Japanese-American citizens. These cases are not technicalities buried in legalese; rather, they reflect the American ethos. This visualization aims to help users explore the evolution American values over a period of 80 years by using the Supreme Court as a focal lens through which to view the American people.
(This project was made using the Supreme Court Database hosted by Washington University in St. Louis Law School, the Supreme Court citations database collected by Fowler and Jeon, and collections of text from Justia, Oyez, and Wikipedia. The process book for the project can be found here, and a video demonstrating its use can be found here.)
One of the more basic components necessary to understanding the United States Supreme Court is to understand the notion of ideology. The two representative ideologies in our dataset are Conservative and Liberal (Unspecified means that it is unclear as to whether a particular case ruling was made in favor of either of the two ideologies). The two can be defined as follows:
"Liberals believe in government action to achieve equal opportunity and equality for all. It is the duty of the government to alleviate social ills and to protect civil liberties and individual and human rights. Believe the role of the government should be to guarantee that no one is in need. Liberal policies generally emphasize the need for the government to solve problems.
Conservatives believe in personal responsibility, limited government, free markets, individual liberty, traditional American values and a strong national defense. Believe the role of government should be to provide people the freedom necessary to pursue their own goals. Conservative policies generally emphasize empowerment of the individual to solve problems."
- Student News Daily
The two visualizations in this section attempt to show two things: 1) how the ideology of all case rulings changes over time and 2) how the ideologies (measured by Martin-Quinn scores) of the serving justices changed over time; more positive scores mean that a justice is more conservative, while more negative values mean that a justice is more liberal. When looking at the data, we can begin to make assumptions such as Justice Douglas having a major Liberal sway to the case rulings when he served through the 50's, 60's, and into the early 70's.
Specific values can be discovered by mousing over either visualization to see data for a particular year, and the filters can allow you to look for trends during a particular year range as well as for particular issue areas (for example, which issue area seemed to cause the largest blip in Liberal rulings around 1963-1964?)
"Third-grader Linda Brown was denied admission to the white school a few blocks from her home and was forced to attend the blacks-only school a mile away."
The Court decided in favor of Brown unanimously.
-CNN: Top US Supreme Court Decisions Fast Facts
This visualization shows the number of cases addressed by the Supreme Court per issue area with an emphasis on cases that were ruled unconstitutional. Each area is color-coded and the total radii is proportional to the number of cases. In each area, the difference of radii is proportional to the ratio of total number of cases v. unconstitutional rulings.
The curves to the right represent all cases ruled unconstitutional, according to the filter setting selected (time period and issue areas). Cases are sorted according to the decision date, older cases are shown at the top. Landmark cases are shown in a different color and the summary of each landmark case is displayed on hovering a curve.
Explore by clicking around and have fun discovering interesting unconstitutional cases!
Unlike the majority of legal systems in the world, the United states uses a system called Common Law (in contrast to Civil Law), defined as "A system of law inherited from England based on legal precedents or tradition instead of statutory law or systematic legal codes" by Carp, Stidham, and Manning in The Federal Courts. This conception of law allows the power of the courts to extend beyond adjudication and into the realm of policy-making.
As a result, every court in the US can set precedent, defined as a decision which should be followed by all lower courts in the same jurisdiction as the court that sets the precedent. Since the Supreme Court is the highest court in the land, and has jurisdiction over all legal issues in the United States, precedents set by the Supreme Court bind the American legal system, setting policy that can only be overturned by the Supreme Court itself.
It should be noted that overruling precedent is separate from setting precedent. In the former scenario, the Court may rule on a law or statute and in doing so create a line of reasoning that all other courts should follow. This is in contrast to the latter scenario, in which the Court makes a ruling which changes their line of reasoning from a previous decision.
Below is a visualization of these precedent-altering cases, which aims to explore how American society's viewpoints on different issues has changed over time through the lens of the Supreme Court. Each line showing a Supreme Court case that set a precedent linked to the later case that overturned that precedent. The visualization can be explored by mousing over it, by sorting and grouping the data, or by interacting with the timeline and filters above.