The November 2006 issue marked the fiftieth year that the Harvard Law Review published its annual matrix of the inter-agreement amongst all of the Justices for a particular term. These matrices include both raw numbers and percentages as to how often any two Justices sided together on cases for that particular term relative to the amount of cases the two Justices heard together. Aggregating this data over the fifty-year span allows for some important insights and benchmarks as to the last half century of the Supreme Court—the 1956 to 2005 Terms. These aggregated matrices of agreement allow for interesting visualizations of the Supreme Court, both longitudinally and year by year. Using existing software, measures of agreement (and disagreement) allow for the Justices to be distributed spatially as to their ideological sympathies. The fifty-year perspective also allows scholars of the Court to set empirical benchmarks to evaluate individual terms. This article introduces a new metric of annual, term, Court agreement known as the Aggregate Harmony Metric. Published in and cite as: Peter A. Hook, The Aggregate Harmony Metric and a Statistical and Visual Contextualization of the Rehnquist Court: 50 Years of Data, 24 Const. Comment. 221 (2007).
The Aggregate Harmony Metric and a Statistical and Visual Contextualization of the Rehnquist Court: 50 Years of Data
