"When President Gerald Ford nominated him in 1975, Justice John Paul Stevens occupied the ideological center of the Supreme Court. By the time he retired in 2010, he was the Court’s most liberal member. Over those thirty-five years, the Court changed far more than Stevens did. ‘What was once on the extreme right is now merely conservative,’ wrote University of Chicago constitutional law professor Cass Sunstein. ‘What was once conservative is now centrist. What was centrist is now left wing. What was once on the left no longer exists.’
According to a study using Martin-Quinn scores, ‘the current court is the most conservative since at least the 1930s,’ wrote Nate Silver of the New York Times recently."
Ari Berman of The Nation in Why the Supreme Court Matters (via tartantambourine)
