Report Proves Scalia Most Likely To Side With Conservative Speakers In Free Speech Cases

In yet another example of how the Supreme Court has become rigged to favor conservatives, a new study proves that all conservative justices on the nation’s highest court side with fellow conservatives in free speech cases at least three time more than with liberal speakers. 

In other words, the Supreme Court’s conservative jurists side with those who hold beliefs in which the Justices themselves agree — whereas the liberal jurists are far more balanced.

In, “For Justices, Free Speech Often Means ‘Speech I Agree With’,” veteran New York Times reporter Adam Liptak today profiles a new study which finds that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is more than three times more likely to side with a conservative speaker in free speech cases. Examining Scalia’s votes in 161 free speech cases, the 78-year old Roman Catholic Reagan nominee sided with conservative speakers 65 percent of the time, and with liberal speakers less than 21 percent.

The rest of the Roberts’ Court conservatives are not far behind. The study finds Justice Clarence Thomas sided with conservative speakers 65 percent of the time, and with liberal speakers just 23 percent. And while Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito have ruled on only about two dozen free speech cases — making their track record too light to hold much weight yet — their direction is clear.

Out of 27 cases, the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court sided with conservative speakers 64 percent of the time, and with liberal speakers a mere 15 percent. Justice Alito’s 24 cases netted a siding with conservative 54 percent of the time, and with liberals only nine percent.

Meanwhile, liberal justices sided with conservatives slightly less than liberal, but the variance is exceptionally small, as this chart from the study shows: 

 

The researchers note (PDF) that while “liberal Justices are (overall) more supportive of free speech claims than conservative Justices, the votes of both liberal and conservative Justices tend to reflect their preferences toward the ideological grouping of the speaker, and not solely an underlying taste for (or against) the First Amendment.”

The study, Do Justices Defend the Speech They Hate? In-Group Bias, Opportunism, and the First Amendment, was performed by Lee Epstein, Christopher M. Parker, and Jeffrey A. Segal at the University of Southern California.