Do Changing Social Attitudes Cause Justices Leftward Drift?
Why do Supreme Court Justices often become more liberal over time? Any answer is necessarily speculative, but we can nonetheless consider some possibilities. Despite working in a marble temple, Justices are not isolated from the society in which they live. Thus, as the broader attitudes of society change, so too do those of the Justices. Language reflects a relatively minor–but still instructive–instance of this phenomenon: Supreme Court opinions in the 1960s and 1970s talk of “Negroes,” those from the 1980s refer to “blacks,” and more recent opinions refer to “African-Americans.” To give a more substantive example, in 1986 Justice O’Connor joined Justice Byron White’s opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick, which rejected a claimed constitutional right to same-sex sodomy as “at best facetious.” In 2003, she voted with the majority in Lawrence v. Texas to strike down a state law forbidding same-sex sodomy. Although O’Connor argued that the results were consistent–because Hardwick involved due p
