Now that I have a system for doing it I’m going to post these ratings periodically.
As you can see the outliers are Gorsuch and Jackson. The justices with the strongest partisan/ideological bias are Thomas and Alito, followed by Kagan and Sotomayor. The most consensus-oriented justices are Barrett and Roberts.
I’m not sure “bias” is the right word for what it seems like this is measuring (“departure from consensus”). Is it a deviance index?
In looking at the results, I think it’s important to keep in mind the role of seniority in case assignments. Shortly after oral argument, the justices convene and in order of seniority each justice explains their view of the case uninterrupted. (The Chief Justice is always senior, followed by the other justices according to length of tenure) After some more colloquy they take a straw vote and the senior justice on the majority side gets to select who writes the opinion. Roberts is almost always in the majority and he typically assigns himself all of the important decisions, which are the types of decisions that every justice may have strong opinions on the direction of travel going forward.
Deviance from Roberts can take two different forms. Gorsuch has idiosyncratic views on how a judgment should be reached. He even uses concurrences to critique other concurrences (as in the tariff case). The three liberal justices are in a difficult position because it takes four votes for SCOTUS to accept an appeal, so the selection is unfavorable. If the court were 6-3 liberal, different cases would be heard and they would be in the majority far more often, much more resembling their counterparts in various degrees.
I think at present we actually have what is a rather serious problem: an almost complete mismatch between the way our laws are written and the preferences of many judges and lawmakers.
As you know we have a common law system not a civil code system. Our laws are written for a common law system. If they were written for a civil code system they would necessarily be much longer and more detailed, taking as many contingencies into account as possible. That’s the way laws are written in France or Germany for example.
These days many judges reason as though they were sitting on the French Conseil d’État. It’s possible that I’m more sensitive to that because I come from Missouri.