By at least one measure, Sonia Sotomayor is likely the most liberal Supreme Court nominee in more than 40 years.

Sotomayor's ranking is a preliminary finding by Stony Brook University political science professor Jeffrey Segal, who parses newspaper editorials to score high court nominees on their perceived qualifications and ideology.

Sotomayor has a perceived ideology of 0.79 on the 0-1 scale, with 1 being most liberal. Her qualifications register at 0.8, with 1 being most qualified.

The ranking system, known as the Segal-Cover score (Albert Cover was Segal's original partner developing the system), evaluates nominees dating back to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration. The newspapers Segal uses are the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times.

The ideology score "is a little higher than I would have expected," he said, possibly because of all the focus on the ruling of Sotomayor's 2nd Circuit panel in the polarizing discrimination case Ricci v. DeStefano. "These scores represent to some extent a fixture on what's current, not necessarily what the court would see," he added.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg has the most liberal ideology score of anyone currently on the court; she was at 0.68 as a nominee. Stephen Breyer is second at 0.48. Sotomayor's presumed score would be the most liberal since Thurgood Marshall scored at 1.0 in 1967.

Sotomayor's 0.8 qualifications score was less of a surprise, Segal said. "The only real question about her qualifications" was whether she would be biased as a judge, stemming from concerns over her "wise Latina woman" remark, he said.

Segal will continue looking through editorials until the full Senate votes on Sotomayor, expected later this week. Segal said, though, that only new information would drastically change his preliminary findings. He cautioned that these scores only measure perceptions of nominees and don't predict how they would rule on the high court.