The Segal-Cover score is used by political scientists to gauge how a judicial nominee will actually vote on the bench. A content analysis of newspaper editorials yields a score from 0.0 to 1.0 that's supposed to reflect the nominee's qualifications and ideological leanings, scores which are then used to predict future votes.
I suspect there's more to how the score is derived, because otherwise it's really just a measure of social perception that may or may not have scientific backing. And on the question of ideology, I'm not sure whether the score attempts to measure political or judicial philosophy. A left-leaning politican who endorses judicial restraint would score high as both a liberal and a conservative. What then?
Perhaps the poli-sci folks out there could help us out.
In any event, though there's some debate about the validity of the scores, some evidence suggests it may be particularly relevant to voting patterns in civil liberties cases. An e-mail I received yesterday said that Sotomayor scored .81 on qualifications and .78 on ideology. That means she's bright and somewhat left of center (though not extremely so), and indicates that she will take the 'liberal' position in 62% of her cases.
Here's a link to SCT nominees from 1937-2005, with some interesting take-aways. For example, some Justices perceived to have the highest qualifications were also thought to have the strongest ideological leanings (Justices Brennan and Scalia fall into this category), while the moderates were perceived as the least qualified (see Breyer and Clark). Speaking of Clark, poor guy ranked lowest on qualifications with a score of .111, followed by Black with .160. But the numbers are really all over the board, making it hard to pull out any patterns on a quick read.
For more on Segal-Cover and the current Court check out this and this.
-Kathleen Bergin
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