There’s an old saw, often mistakenly attributed to Winston Churchill, that goes something like this: “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative when you’re 35, you have no brain.” A person should start left and drift right, and not the other way around, the adage suggests.1But when it comes to Supreme Court justices, growing older appears to incite a trend in the opposite ideological direction. One prominent measure of judicial ideology — the Martin-Quinn score — illustrates this tendency. These scores, as DW-Nominate does for legislators, use the justices’ votes to quantify their position on a left-right spectrum. A more negative score means a justice is further left; a more positive score means she’s further right. The scores are based on data from the Supreme Court Database and are calculated back to 1937.
Source: Supreme Court Justices Get More Liberal As They Get Older | FiveThirtyEight