A related phenomenon: Right-leaning Supreme Court justices move left as they get older, possibly because they’re in a left-leaning part of the country (DC) and that’s where all their friends are.
A typical justice nominated by a Republican president starts out at age 50 as an Antonin Scalia and retires at age 80 as an Anthony Kennedy. A justice nominated by a Democrat, however, is a lifelong Stephen Breyer.
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The Cocktail Scene. Maybe the justices — human as they are, after all — want to fit in at parties. “Justices may be subject to influences by the Beltway cocktail scene and want to be perceived as reasonable and moderate,” Josh Blackman, a Supreme Court scholar at the South Texas College of Law, told me in an email. That assumes the cocktail set is liberal, what with its law professors and journalists. But that stereotype does exist in D.C. President Richard Nixon, for example, explicitly wondered if his Supreme Court nominee Harry Blackmun could “resist the Washington cocktail party circuit.”
A related phenomenon: Right-leaning Supreme Court justices move left as they get older, possibly because they’re in a left-leaning part of the country (DC) and that’s where all their friends are.
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