What Makes a Sound Supreme Court Justice?

Abstract

When asked, legal scholars, commentators, and avid Court watchers will gleefully name the best Supreme Court justices to have served on the bench. Even justices have their favorite predecessors, and numerous academic lists have set out to rank justices' tenures on the bench. Yet when asked what exactly makes a good justice, there seems to be a pause among academics– individuals can seldom list the qualities that make for a legendary tenure. There is a hole within the literature that identifies which factors made the greatest Supreme Court justices the legal giants they were. This article aims to fill that hole by identifying the qualities that land justices on scholars’ “all-time” lists