Supreme Court Justices

Historical analysis of United States Supreme Court Justices. In this project, I visualize 116 justices in the style of emoji portraits. I also examine the voting behavior during the Senate confirmation hearings.

About

As I tuned into the latest Senate confirmation hearing for Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, my curiosity about the history of the US Supreme Court Justices was piqued. I wanted to know more: How many justices have been appointed over the years? Who nominated them, and what was the president’s party affiliation? And what about the Senate’s confirmation roll call - do senators always vote along party lines, or is this a new trend?

To satisfy my curiosity, I turned to rvest - a powerful web scraping library for R. With its help, I collected the information I needed from Wikipedia pages and Congress.gov. I then used the information to create a couple of visualizations to answer these questions.

Emoji Portraits

Here are all 116 justices à la emoji portraits. You can hover over each emoji to reveal the name of the justice as well as the nominating president. This graphic was created with ggplot2 and ggiraph.