The United States Legal System: The Jurisprudence of Partisanship With Supreme Court Rulings. - DOI 10.5935/2448-0517.20190048

Abstract

The current state of jurisprudence on legal precedent in the global setting, specifically within United States legal system, the case study for this article, is morphing to a cynical view of the partisanship within the court that judges the supreme law of the land - the Supreme Court. Rhetorical analysis of Supreme Court practices is altering from the view of holistic decisions by justices to an assumption of partisan bias, or politically constructed bounds, that justices are subject to, willingly or unwillingly, due to the nature of the position. Though portrayed as a ruling unaltered by partiality from membership in a partisan body, and instead solely outlined by the Constitution of the United States with a duty of upholding the integrity of the document, a judge’s role is not as unquestionable. Due to this, it is evident that political parties heavily influence the rulings and thus, precedents of future, past, and present. We analyze the effects of affiliations with a political party on a bipartisan scale—with the common agglomerations of Supreme Court rulings. We also analyzed ruling trends based on a judge's subjective beliefs and deviations from each judge's judgment when ruling on these cases. We have also devised a metric which calculates the probability of a judge deviating from his political party's belief and the effects of their belief on their rulings. Future studies will be able to expand on this topic by using the metric as a method of predicting rulings based on a probability matrix, and an analyzer of the average bias of the justices based on a given time period.