Sarah Isgur is a graduate of Harvard Law School who clerked on the Fifth Circuit. She was Justice Department spokeswoman during the Trump administration and is the host of the legal podcast Advisory Opinions for the Dispatch.If you only get your Supreme Court news from political pundits, you might have gotten the wrong idea about a case decided last year on whether to let Florida ban drag shows.
That chart helps show how the justices’ decisions relate to each other, but there’s another way to graph the same data. Statisticians use a numerical algorithm called a singular value decomposition to look for the strongest relationships between rows and columns in a table of numbers like the one above. A singular value decomposition simplifies datasets to find the broadest mathematical relationships across the data and plots them on two axes.
To be sure, other court watchers may interpret what the axes mean differently. But our interpretation that the y axis represents an “institutionalist” axis aligns with what some of the justices have said publicly.
But first, we have to agree on what makes a case important. Is it the number of people affected? Is it the economic impact? There isn’t a right answer to this question — but if one defines “important” as the most politically divisive, then it becomes circular. The most politically divisive cases wind up being … the most politically divisive, both on and off the court.