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.

Senate Confirmations

I also wanted to look at the voting behavior in the US Senate for the most appointed justices. Hovering over each seat reveals the corresponding senator’s name. Interesting to see how the rise in partisan politics has impacted the Senate votes in the last decade.