Politicization Of The Supreme Court

The names of the justices, from left to right:

1. Clarence Thomas
2. Antonin Scalia
3. Smauel Alito
4. John Roberts (Chief Justice)
5. Anthony Kennedy

Post by "Sayf Maslul"

I'll only mention 2 examples for now:

1. Bush - Gore (2000)
2. Corporate Personhood

The below information is from WikiPedia:

Clerks hired by each of the justices of the Supreme Court are often given considerable leeway in the opinions they draft. "Supreme Court clerkship appeared to be a nonpartisan institution from the 1940s into the 1980s", according to a study published in 2009 by the law review of Vanderbilt University Law School.

"As law has moved closer to mere politics, political affiliations have naturally and predictably become proxies for the different political agendas that have been pressed in and through the courts", former federal court of appeals judge J. Michael Luttig said. 

David J. Garrow, professor of history at the University of Cambridge, stated that the Court had thus begun to mirror the political branches of government.

"We are getting a composition of the clerk workforce that is getting to be like the House of Representatives", Professor Garrow said. "Each side is putting forward only ideological purists."

According to the Vanderbilt Law Review study, this politicized hiring trend reinforces the impression that the Supreme Court is "a superlegislature responding to ideological arguments rather than a legal institution responding to concerns grounded in the rule of law." [WikiPedia]