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Partisanship "All The Way Down" On The U.S. Supreme Court, Lee Epstein

Pepperdine Law Review

Just as the American public is politically polarized, so too is the U.S. Supreme Court. More than ever before, a clear alignment exists between the Justices’ partisanship and their ideological leanings (known as “partisan sorting”). Disapproval of opposing-party identifiers also appears to have intensified (“partisan antipathy”). This Article offers evidence of both forms of polarization. It shows that partisan sorting has resulted in wide gaps in voting between Republican and Democratic appointees; and it supplies data on “us-against-them” judging in the form of increasing antipathy toward opposite-partisan presidents. Taken collectively, the data point not to law “all the way down,” …