Coincidentally, in Bakke, Justice John Paul Stevens-then a recent Gerald Ford appointee-wrote a dissent joined by the court’s most conservative members, though a few decades later he would emerge as the most consistently liberal voice on the bench. Wade and Powell swing-voting to permit affirmative action in Regents of the University of California v. Richard Nixon, for instance, thought he was getting solid right-wingers when he appointed Harry Blackmun and Lewis Powell, only to find, several years later, Blackmun authoring Roe v.

Sabato, the director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, has suggested that about one quarter of confirmed nominees over the last half century have wound up “evolving from conservative to moderate or liberal.” Kennedy-the tendency in recent decades to drift leftward has been strong enough to gain both popular and scholarly attention. Roosevelt, and Byron White, appointed by John F. While there have been a number of relatively reliable conservative justices over the years-Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Rehnquist being prime examples-and some important right-shifting exceptions-notably Felix Frankfurter, appointed by Franklin D. Why are presidents, and other backers, so often disappointed by the eventual performance of their nominees? And why do so many Supreme Court justices drift to the left, especially on matters of individual rights?

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