The US Constitution states that Supreme Court Justices “shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour” — generally interpreted as a lifetime term, barring impeachment. Term lengths have varied from less than one year to more than 36. Since 1970, the shortest term — excluding active Justices — has been 15 years.
They’re given staff to do their actual work. They might have to show up 30 days a year. The rest of the year, they’re perfecting the art of graft, taking money if not for votes but to give politically charged talks masquerading as legal scholarship.
For all the hate that Thomas gets for being personally scummy and openly taking money to enrich himself from interested parties with cases before the court and barely speaking on record, he’s probably the only one being (if unintentionally) honest about it.
I’m definitely not a data expert, and while this is visually appealing, I’m having trouble really gaining insight from it. Maybe I’m an idiot, but it just doesn’t read easy to me
The Supreme Court looks younger, that’s for sure!
pretty sure taking millions in bribes doesn’t count as good behavior.
I feel like it would make more sense to have the vertical axis be the 9 seats of the Supreme Court with each bar representing one justice’s term, keeping each bar color coded by their length.
There’s no need to vertically arrange the bars by their length if you’re also color coding them by length.
One of the worst data visualizations I’ve ever seen, to be honest.
This format really doesn’t work. It’s hard to read frequency of tenure over time as the bars are all different sizes. It’s also hard to see the tenure length of court members at a given moment. I’m not really sure what to glean.
i genuinely have no idea how to parse this plot
been looking at this for 5 minutes and it makes no sense to me.
![US Supreme Court Justices by term length [OC]](https://www.europesays.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/78of6luumvid1-1920x1024.png)
11 comments
Source: United States Supreme Court
Tool: Illustrator
Explore the interactive version [here](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/18785520/).
The US Constitution states that Supreme Court Justices “shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour” — generally interpreted as a lifetime term, barring impeachment. Term lengths have varied from less than one year to more than 36. Since 1970, the shortest term — excluding active Justices — has been 15 years.
We omitted labels from this chart (it got super cluttered), but the [interactive version here](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/18785520/) has the names of Justices, term lengths, and years served.
It’s the cushiest job in America.
They’re given staff to do their actual work. They might have to show up 30 days a year. The rest of the year, they’re perfecting the art of graft, taking money if not for votes but to give politically charged talks masquerading as legal scholarship.
For all the hate that Thomas gets for being personally scummy and openly taking money to enrich himself from interested parties with cases before the court and barely speaking on record, he’s probably the only one being (if unintentionally) honest about it.
I’m definitely not a data expert, and while this is visually appealing, I’m having trouble really gaining insight from it. Maybe I’m an idiot, but it just doesn’t read easy to me
The Supreme Court looks younger, that’s for sure!
pretty sure taking millions in bribes doesn’t count as good behavior.
I feel like it would make more sense to have the vertical axis be the 9 seats of the Supreme Court with each bar representing one justice’s term, keeping each bar color coded by their length.
There’s no need to vertically arrange the bars by their length if you’re also color coding them by length.
One of the worst data visualizations I’ve ever seen, to be honest.
This format really doesn’t work. It’s hard to read frequency of tenure over time as the bars are all different sizes. It’s also hard to see the tenure length of court members at a given moment. I’m not really sure what to glean.
i genuinely have no idea how to parse this plot
been looking at this for 5 minutes and it makes no sense to me.