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search and seizure doctrine. At the extreme right of the policy dimension are Skinner v. Railway
Labor Executives’ Association (1989) and Board of Education v. Earls (2002), both opinions upholding
searches without individualized suspicion. In Skinner, the justices found the interest of safety on
the nation’s rail lines to be significant enough to justify drug and alcohol tests of rail personnel
immediately after a train accident. Earls, like Vernonia, presents a case of drug testing as a
condition for participation in extracurriculars, but unlike Vernonia, the majority opinion upheld
suspicionless tests for students seeking to participate in virtually any school-sponsored activity,
even those such as the choir or the honor society that are least likely to attract the students using
illegal drugs. Whatever the virtues of these searches, they are undoubtedly quite conservative, and
the scaling method recognizes them as such.
Conclusions
We began by noting that political scientists who undertake quantification of the Supreme
Court for statistical purpose largely ignore its policy outputs. Are we discarding valuable
information? The use of the Wordscore application suggests that it may be quite easy to summarize
a great deal of information contained within those opinions and to extract estimates of the policy
positions that they represent.
By our lights, these estimates are indeed valid indicators of the content of the justices’
opinions. Although one may certainly quibble with the relative placement of any individual case, it
is hard to deny that the Wordscore procedure --- which we must emphasize neither speaks nor
understands the English language --- is capable of identifying important similarities and differences
that exist within a body of law.
By no means do we intend our exercise here to be interpreted as a substitute for the
Convention