Updated at 6:06 p.m.
If confirmed for the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor will be one of the most qualified justices -- though not the most qualified -- and likely as liberal as Ruth Bader Ginsburg. That's the hunch coming from Jeffrey Segal, a political science professor at Stony Brook University who combs newspaper editorials to rank justices on their perceived qualifications and ideology.
The ranking system, known as the Segal-Cover score (Albert Cover was Segal's original partner developing the system), evaluates justices dating back to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1937 nomination of Hugo Black. It uses a scale of 0 to 1: For qualifications, 0 is the least qualified and 1 is the most, and for ideology, 0 is the most conservative and 1 is the most liberal.
On the current court, Ginsburg ranks as the most liberal, with a score of 0.68. Antonin Scalia is the most conservative, at 0. And they tie for the most qualified, at 1 each. Segal analyzes editorials from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times. The Journal was added starting with David Souter's nomination to compensate for the Los Angeles Times' drift leftward, Segal said. For Sotomayor, he started tracking editorials since the day after President Obama nominated her and will continue until the day the full Senate votes on her.
"She's going to fall as a moderate liberal," Segal predicts. "There will be evidence that she's not a doctrinaire. And she'll come out pretty high on the qualifications, but not at the very, very top."
How Sotomayor explains some controversial comments, especially her "wise Latina woman" remark, in the confirmation hearings will factor into her qualification score, Segal said, since editorialists will likely consider that in their analyses.
When asked about the bias the scores could reflect since they're based only on media reports, Segal said the inclusion of newspapers on both sides of the divide should ensure that they're an accurate representation of how justices are being perceived. He also said that the ideology ratings end up doing "an excellent job of predicting justices' overall liberalism or conservatism once they're on the Supreme Court." Statistically comparing justices' ideology score and voting behavior going back to the Warren court, Segal said there is a 0.79 "correlation coefficient." This means that you can predict the justices' overall voting behavior "fairly accurately simply by knowing their ideology," Segal said.
Segal and Northwestern law professor Lee Epstein, who collaborated on Advice And Consent, a 2005 book on the judicial appointment process, are working with Andrew Martin of Washington University in St. Louis on a project that will rank justices on the same criteria by analyzing thousands of blogs. How useful will this be considering the blogosphere's wide range from insightful to worthless?
"We'll find out," Segal said. "I wouldn't put as much faith into this as accurately measuring the qualifications or the ideology of Sotomayor as I would the editorial judgment we'll be looking at. But, we'll see what we come up with. It's sort of an experiment."
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