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The US Supreme Court throughout the 20th century has been characterized asbeing divided between liberals and conservatives, suggesting that justices withsimilar ideologies would have voted similarly had they overlapped in tenure.What if they had? I build an empirical, quantitative model of thiscounterfactual hypothesis using pairwise maximum entropy. I infer how 36justices from 1946-2016 would have all voted on a Super Supreme Court. Themodel is strikingly consistent with a standard voting model from politicalscience despite using $10^5$ less parameters and fitting the observedstatistics better. As with historical courts, the Super Court is dominated byconsensus. The rate at which consensus decays as more justices are included isextremely slow, nearly 100 years, and indicates that the modern Supreme Courtis an extremely stable institution. Beyond consensus, I discover a richstructure of dissenting blocs that are distributed along a heavy-tailed Zipf'slaw. The heavy tail means that dominant dissenting modes fail to capture theentire spectrum of dissent. Thus, I find that Supreme Court voting over time isnot low-dimensional despite implications to the contrary in historical analysisof Supreme Court voting. Although it has been long presumed that strong higherorder correlations are induced by features of the cases, the institution, andthe justices, I show that such complexity can be expressed in a minimal modelrelying only on pairwise correlations. From the perspective of model selection,this minimal model may generalize better and thus be useful for prediction ofSupreme Court voting over time.

Strong consensus on US Supreme Court spans a century