Quote Originally Posted by Daltex View Post
This comment has no basis is reality.
Well, like much of politics it depends on how you view reality. Quality researchers have attempted to quantify the relative political records government officials (the most popular model being dw-nominate) and some have approached the problem of Supreme Court justices. One method results in this chart: Using the method here, justice Scalia appears to have become much less conservative with his votes over the years on the bench. But wait! You could also consider looking at the voting records like this: And now Scalia is becoming more conservative over time. What gives? You can (and should) read for yourself here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideo...ourt_justices# but the short of it is that the latter chart includes more information, such as written positions, to get a more accurate reading *but also* excludes many cases. The latter chart focuses on high profile areas of crime, privacy, free speech, civil rights, abortion, and religion. So, to a certain extent, the data modeling (and remember these are probabilistic models) would disagree with SteveP, as when federalistic and procedural cases are considered the recent years of Scalia appear to be trending towards the center. But public perception of the guy has likely been pushed to the far right due to the overwhelming attention paid to the personal social issues brought before the court. tl;dr: there is data, it probably disagrees, but it's impossible to be sure in a purely intellectual sense.