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Millionaire Justices and Attitudes Towards the Supreme Court

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Abstract

Relying on theories positing general resentment of the rich, we argue that people who believe there are a greater number of Justices who are millionaires will have more negative attitudes towards the Court than those who believe there are fewer millionaires on the Court. Analyzing the results of a nationally representative survey, we find that individuals who believe a larger number of the Justices are millionaires are more likely to believe the Court gives special rights to the wealthy and are overall less likely to view the Court as legitimate. We supplement these results with a survey experiment, demonstrating that individuals believe the Court will become less fair if a millionaire nominee is confirmed to be a Justice and that individuals are less likely to support a millionaire nominee compared to nominees with a lower net worth. Our results have implications for perceptions of bias within the judiciary, the selection of judicial nominees, and how attitudes about the wealthy can influence attitudes towards institutions.

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Data Availability

The data and code required to reproduce the results presented in this manuscript can be found on the Political Behavior Dataverse at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/PSOWOV.

Notes

  1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-07/ketanji-brown-jackson-memoir-joins-roster-of-image-buffing-supreme-court-books?utm_source=website&utm_medium=share&utm_campaign=copy Bloomberg “Ketanji Brown Jackson Book Deal Joins Trendy Supreme Court Side Hustle.” Jan 7, 2023.

  2. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-07/ketanji-brown-jackson-memoir-joins-roster-of-image-buffing-supreme-court-books?utm_source=website&utm_medium=share&utm_campaign=copy#xj4y7vzkg Bloomberg “Ketanji Brown Jackson Book Deal Joins Trendy Supreme Court Side Hustle.” Jan 7, 2023.

  3. https://time.com/6186294/supreme-court-salary-book-deals/ Times. “Here’s How Much the Supreme Court Justices Made Last Year.” June, 9 2022.

  4. https://www.forbes.com/sites/brendancoffey/2011/09/07/how-rich-are-the-supreme-court-justices/?sh=7d13ad2c3790 Forbes. “How Rich are the Supreme Court Justices?” September 7, 2011.

  5. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/06/20/supreme-court-justices-financial-disclosure/11105985/ USA Today. “Nearly all Supreme Court justices are millionaires.” June 20, 2014.

  6. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/25/us/neil-gorsuch-property-sale.html The New York Times. “Head of a Major Law Firm Bought Real Estate From Gorsuch.” April 25, 2023.

  7. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/25/us/neil-gorsuch-property-sale.html The New York Times. “Justices Thomas and Alito Delay Release of Financial Disclosures.” June 7, 2023.

  8. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/25/us/neil-gorsuch-property-sale.html The New York Times. “Justices Thomas and Alito Delay Release of Financial Disclosures.” June 7, 2023.

  9. For example, the widely read SCOTUSBlog did a deep-dive of the 2021 disclosures. https://www.scotusblog.com/2022/06/justices-earned-extra-money-from-books-and-teaching-in-2021-disclosures-show/ SCOTUSblog. “Justices earned extra money from books and teaching in 2021, disclosures show.” June 9, 2022.

  10. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-22/barrett-s-big-book-deal-called-bad-optics-for-supreme-court?utm_source=website&utm_medium=share&utm_campaign=copy Bloomberg. “Amy Coney Barrett’s Big Book Deal Is Called Bad Optics for the Supreme Court.” April 22, 2021.

  11. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/28/us/politics/28scotus.html The New York Times. “Sotomayor Got 1.175 Million for Memoir, Forms Reveal.” May 28, 2011.

  12. https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/supreme-court-nominee-brett-kavanaugh-piled-up-credit-card-debt-by-purchasing-nationals-tickets-white-house-says/2018/07/11/8e3ad7d6-8460-11e8-9e80-403a221946a7_story.html. The Washington Post. “Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh piled up credit card debt by purchasing Nationals tickets, White House says.” July 11, 2018.

  13. https://www.scotusblog.com/justices-financial-disclosures/, https://www.scotusblog.com/2021/06/less-travel-plenty-of-royalties-for-justices-in-2020/, https://www.scotusblog.com/2022/06/justices-earned-extra-money-from-books-and-teaching-in-2021-disclosures-show/ SCOTUSblog 2019, SCOTUSblog 2020, SCOTUSblog 2021.

  14. It is possible, indeed likely, that wealth is only one factor that influences the probusiness leanings of the Supreme Court (Epstein et al., 2012).

  15. The survey was conducted shortly after the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Barrett’s confirmation was somewhat controversial because the Senate Republicans quickly conducted her hearing and confirmed her prior to the presidential election. They did so even though four years prior they refused to undertake the confirmation hearing of a Democratic nominee. This may have influenced attitudes towards the Court and could potentially effect the results we present. To rule this out, we re-estimated the regressions presented in Table 1 controlling for favorability towards Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Our key results are unchanged. Thus, we are confident that the confirmation hearing of Justice Barrett is not driving our results. These results are provided in the appendix.

  16. https://doi.org/10.25940/ROPER-31088941 Cornell Gallup Poll from 2012.

  17. 8 of the 9 Justices report assets that exceed one millionaire dollars. Justice Brett Kavanaugh reported assets between $15,000 and $65,000. However, disclosure forms do not require the Justices to report all sources of wealth, including homes and federal retirement plans. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/supreme-court-justices-are-richer-than-about-90-of-americans Bloomberg Law. “Supreme Court Justices Are Richer than 90% of Americans.” April 20, 2023.

  18. Gibson et al. (2003) recommend a six question battery. We asked participants only these three questions for the sake of efficiently using the survey space available to us. Some may worry that conceptualize slippage may occur by not relying on the complete index. To rule this out, we searched for publicly available surveys that included all the legitimacy questions. The closest match we found was the Annenberg Supreme Court survey of 2005 (Bartels & Johnston, 2012) This survey asked participants five of the six legitimacy questions, including the three used in our manuscript. The five questions asked were: 1: Do away with the Court 2: The Court gets too mixed up in politics. 3: The Court favors some groups over others. 4: General trust in the Court. 5: Trust the Court to do the right thing. We estimated the legitimacy index using the five questions using the standard summated scale approach and then we estimated the legitimacy index using the three questions we used in the manuscript. We find that the two are correlated at .90. This leads us to be confident our three questions are capturing the underlying measure proposed by Gibson et al. (2003).

  19. For partisan identity, moderates are the baseline reference category. For ideological disposition, moderates are the baseline reference category. The wording of all the survey questions used are available in the appendix.

  20. We ultimately decide to use a conjoint design rather than a vignette experiment for a few different reasons. First, in a vignette experiment of this type, it is difficult to come up with credible treatments. For example, 21% of our sample believed there were 0 millionaires on the Supreme Court. For these individuals receiving a “low” treatment that indicated that there was just 1 millionaire on the Supreme Court would be higher than their prior belief. So for these individuals the “low” treatment would in fact not be low. We thought that making a mock news report indicating that there were 0 millionaires on the Supreme Court would come off as awkward and unrealistic. Likewise, 23% of our sample believed there were 9 Justices on the Supreme Court. For these individuals receiving a “high” treatment of anything between 5 and 8 would actually be less than their prior belief. So for these individuals a “high” treatment would not in fact be high. Second, we thought that considering the timing of our experiment, fielded as discussions of Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s book deal were circulating in the media, a conjoint was preferable because the research question is less obvious in this context. Since the conjoint experiment has a profile with many different attributes of nominees, it is unlikely for the participant to guess what we are attending to research. In the vignette experiment, the indication is clearer because only one piece of information is presented to the participants. Participants may then make assumptions about who the millionaires are on the Court (Justice Barrett, for example) and evaluate the Court based on affect towards her rather than the treatment of wealth. Again, we acknowledge that these experimental designs have many benefits, but for our particular study we felt the conjoint experiment was better suited to test our research question. We hope that other researchers will build off our work and attempt to replicate or extent our findings using many different types of designs.

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  1. Department of Political Science, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA

    Alex Badas & Billy Justus

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Correspondence to Alex Badas.

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Badas, A., Justus, B. Millionaire Justices and Attitudes Towards the Supreme Court. Polit Behav (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-023-09905-7

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