In 1776, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense “went viral”, selling 400,000 copies in a country of fewer than 3 million people, because it abandoned dense legal language and spoke directly to ordinary citizens about foundational questions of governance.

In his 2025 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary, Chief Justice John Roberts invoked a similar foundational principle: the judicial oath’s promise to do “equal right to the poor and to the rich,” emphasizing that our constitutional charters “remain firm and unshaken… True then; true now.”

That oath raises an uncomfortable empirical question worth examining.

The Claim: Narrow and TestableThe Claim: Narrow and Testable

I’m not arguing bribery, conspiracy, or blanket illegitimacy. I’m making a specific, measurable claim: the evidence suggests the Supreme Court’s selection process has produced a Court that is statistically more likely to rule in favor of wealthy interests, and this pattern can be tested with data, not just debated as vibes or ideology.

A recent empirical study tracked Supreme Court voting patterns from 1953 to 2022, coding cases where economic interests of wealthy parties were clearly at stake. In 1953, justices appointed by Democrats and Republicans showed similar probabilities of voting for the wealthier party (40% vs. 44%, essentially no gap). By 2022, that gap had widened dramatically: Democratic appointees voted for the wealthy party 27% of the time, while Republican appointees did so 74% of the time, a 47-percentage-point difference.

To be clear: this means that in a neutral case where economic class interests are identifiable, a typical Republican-appointed justice is now 47 points more likely to rule for the wealthier side than a Democratic appointee, according to the model.

The Mechanism: Appointments Are the LeverThe Mechanism: Appointments Are the Lever

Partisan polarization has become “a dominant feature” of Supreme Court decision-making, with the Republican trend steeper than the Democratic one. Since 1969, Republican presidents have appointed 15 of the 19 justices confirmed to the Court (roughly 79%), despite holding the presidency only 58% of those years. The implication: judicial appointments, not individual cases or news cycles, are the primary structural lever shaping the Court’s trajectory.

What Would Falsify This?What Would Falsify This?

For “the Court is structurally pro-rich” to be a defensible claim rather than rhetoric, we need three things:

1. A consistent directional pattern across many cases
2. A measurable gap (not anecdotes)
3. A plausible mechanism connecting appointments to outcomes

All three appear present in the current data. What would change my mind: independent replication with different case coding or sample selection showing the gap disappears, or compelling evidence that the appointment mechanism isn’t driving the observed pattern.

The Path ForwardThe Path Forward

If judicial legitimacy is the goal, the conversation should center on institutional design and selection incentives,
not culture-war accusations. Legitimacy comes from structure, not slogans.

If you had to pick one structural reform to reduce “pro-wealthy drift” risk: term limits, stricter ethics and recusal rules, jurisdiction stripping, Court expansion, or changing the confirmation process, which would produce the highest-signal improvement, and why?