Judicial Ideology, Skrmetti, and Circuit Judges
How does the Skrmetti opinion help define the stakes of judges' ideological positions in the U.S. Courts of Appeals?
Below is a deep dive into judicial ideology, the Supreme Court Skrmetti decision, and especially the ideological positions of Biden and Trump appointed court of appeals judges. Buck up…
Framework
The federal judiciary has long been a central battleground for ideological influence, and the contrast between the appointments of Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden has only sharpened its salience. By early 2025, Biden appointed over 175 federal judges—with a historically high share being women (67%) and people of color (65%) according to Pew Research Center data. His nominees tend to have professional backgrounds in public defense, civil rights, and academic legal theory. Trump, by contrast, reshaped the federal bench with 234 judges in a single term, including three Supreme Court Justices and a robust share drawn from the Federalist Society’s ranks. A second Trump term, according to Brookings analysis, could cement this rightward shift in the appellate courts and extend its influence for decades.
But quantifying that shift—measuring how “conservative” or “liberal” a judge is—remains an inherently fraught endeavor. Traditional approaches to judicial ideology have relied heavily on who appointed the judge or the partisanship of their home-state senators. The widely cited Judicial Common Space (JCS) scores (Epstein et al.) use these affiliations as proxies for ideology, mapping judges onto a one-dimensional scale borrowed from congressional voting patterns. While efficient, these models offer limited insight into how judges actually reason, how they write, and how they decide in specific legal contexts.
This article takes a different approach. Instead of treating ideology as something conferred by political pedigree, it examines judicial ideology as something revealed in opinion language itself—the rhetorical and doctrinal choices judges make when justifying their rulings. This mode of measurement builds on a growing body of empirical work that treats judicial text as a data source: Cope (2024) shows how linguistic structure maps to judicial alignment; Truscott and Romano (2025) models ideology as text using natural language models; and Lauderdale & Clark (2014) link judicial language patterns to latent ideological space, capturing signals overlooked by institutional metadata.
The Players
This piece—and others like it—recognizes that appellate courts differ not only in ideological orientation but also in caseload composition. The Ninth Circuit, where Judges Lucy Koh and Lawrence VanDyke sit, handles a disproportionate share of immigration, environmental, and First Amendment cases. The D.C. Circuit, home to Judges J. Michelle Childs and Justin Walker, specializes in administrative law and regulatory oversight. Meanwhile, the Tenth Circuit, where Judges Veronica Rossman and Allison Eid serve, hears a diverse mix of civil rights, criminal, and institutional governance cases. These jurisdictional distinctions influence the types of legal conflicts each judge confronts, shaping how their ideological commitments are expressed in written opinions. A judge’s apparent lean may thus reflect not only interpretive philosophy, but also the policy domains and party alignments most prevalent in their docket. Here are their JCS Scores.
For comparative context here is a graph with all court of appeals judges’ JCS Scores:
And the average circuit JCS Scores:
What follows is a comparative analysis of these six judges across three circuits, their judicial temperaments, and the ideological topography of the circuits they inhabit. The result is not just a list of scores, but a closer reading of what judicial ideology looks like when expressed in written law.
Methodologically Anchoring Judicial Ideology in Skrmetti
Just yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in United States v. Skrmetti, a landmark ruling upholding Tennessee’s SB1—a law banning gender-affirming care for minors. The Court ruled 6–3 that the law does not violate the Equal Protection Clause, reasoning that its classifications based on age and medical use did not warrant heightened scrutiny and satisfied rational basis review. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts emphasized legislative discretion in the face of scientific uncertainty. In dissent, Justice Sotomayor decried the ruling as an erosion of fundamental protections, arguing that the law enforced discriminatory stereotypes and imposed real harm on transgender youth. In concurring opinions, Justices Thomas and Alito went even further, casting doubt on the doctrinal legitimacy of gender identity protections under the Constitution.
The Skrmetti decision is more than just the Court’s most consequential statement on transgender rights to date—it also offers a rare ideological spectrum in one case, spanning procedural centrism, doctrinal maximalism, and liberal dissent. That spectrum forms the methodological foundation for this article.
To generate the ideological scores in this analysis, each judicial opinion was assessed using a combination of manual coding and natural language processing (NLP) implemented in Python. The NLP pipeline leverages spaCy for tokenization and part-of-speech tagging, along with scikit-learn for TF-IDF weighting to identify doctrinally significant phrases (e.g., “heightened scrutiny,” “rational basis,” “immutable characteristic,” “suspect class”) and their frequency relative to decision structure. Hugging Face Transformers, like Legal-Bert, were used to extract contextual embeddings of judicial language, allowing for comparisons of how judges frame harm, identity, and state power in relation to known ideological anchors. Cosine similarity measures were then applied to align these embeddings with benchmark opinion vectors drawn from Skrmetti’s majority, concurrences, and dissent.
In addition to doctrinal phrase detection, the analysis used dependency parsing to identify whether the judge’s language framed identity groups (e.g., “transgender minors,” “incarcerated individuals”) as subjects of constitutional concern or procedural background. Decisions were scored based on these language patterns in combination with party type alignment and doctrinal reasoning—integrating NLP-extracted features with interpretive coding. The final 0–25 scores reflect not just case outcomes but the structure, tone, and constitutional depth of each judge’s legal reasoning and anchored in the Skrmetti opinions (more on that below):
Score 0 represents the most expansive liberal constitutional reasoning—anchored by Justice Sotomayor’s dissent, which applies heightened scrutiny and centers dignity, harm, and equal protection doctrine.
Score 25 represents maximal conservative originalism—anchored by Justice Thomas’s concurrence, which questions the legitimacy of transgender protections altogether and applies minimal judicial scrutiny to medical regulation.
Scores in between reflect varying degrees of deference, scrutiny, and rights sensitivity, with Chief Justice Roberts’s majority opinion set at 19 (rational basis, institutional legitimacy) and Justice Alito’s partial concurrence at 23 (narrow doctrinal formalism).
Each judge in this analysis was scored based on how their written opinions—across a random selection of cases—mapped to this ideological continuum. The scoring considers:
Party type alignment: who the judge rules for (e.g., individual vs. state, marginalized vs. institutional).
Doctrinal emphasis: what standard of scrutiny the judge applies or avoids.
Linguistic framing: how harm, identity, and government power are described or justified.
The resulting scores reflect not simply how often a judge rules for a plaintiff or defendant, but how they justify those outcomes. A judge who frequently rules for plaintiffs but uses minimalist, procedural language may score closer to the center than one who writes in structurally expansive terms even when ruling the same way.
By rooting the scale in Skrmetti, this analysis captures the live structure of the Court’s ideological divisions—particularly over identity, scrutiny, and state power—and traces how those divisions manifest in the lower federal courts. What follows is a judge-by-judge analysis across the Ninth, Tenth, and D.C. Circuits, revealing not just how judges rule, but how they reason.
Anchor case – Skrmetti (Thomas’ and Sotomayor’s opinions)
Majority – Chief Justice Roberts – Score: 19
Mode of Analysis: Formalist, equal protection minimalism
Key Language:
Rejects heightened scrutiny: “SB1 does not classify on any bases that warrant heightened review.”
Endorses rational basis review even when the law affects only transgender minors: “The application of that prohibition does not turn on sex.”
Downplays “mere reference to sex,” stating: “In the medical context, the mere use of sex-based language does not sweep a statute within the reach of heightened scrutiny.”
Accepts Tennessee’s rationales without interrogating empirical support:
“SB1’s age- and diagnosis-based classifications are plainly rationally related to these findings.”
Rationale for Score:
While moderate in tone, Roberts’s majority operationalizes a conservative formalist baseline. He avoids any doctrinal innovation, upholds state authority, and methodologically aligns with his Dobbs concurrence. This is consistent with a score of 19, slightly more conservative than Roberts’s 17 in Dobbs, due to the broader equal protection implications.
Thomas Concurrence – Score: 25 (Anchor)
Mode: Originalist maximalism
Key Language:
Refuses to apply Bostock to equal protection: “Courts need not engage Bostock at all.”
Discredits medical consensus as “elite sentiment”: “So-called experts have no license to countermand the ‘wisdom, fairness, or logic of legislative choices.’”
Accuses medical authorities of corruption: “WPATH’s lodestar is ideology, not science.”
Frames gender-affirming care as ethically suspect, referencing historical abuses
Rationale for Score:
His concurrence reflects a complete repudiation of living constitutionalism, medical deference, or identity-based protection claims. This is the strongest conservative opinion in the case, justifying a 25, making it a new rightmost anchor for originalist, anti-progressive jurisprudence.
Sotomayor Dissent – Score: 0 (Anchor)
Mode: Intersectional rights-expansion, dignity-based reasoning
Key Language:
Classifies the law as both sex-based and transgender-based: “SB1 mandates unequal treatment based on sex. That is unconstitutional.”
Applies Bostock directly to equal protection: “If sex did not matter, SB1 would not exist.”
Emphasizes medical consensus and harm to minors: “Every major medical association agrees that gender-affirming care is safe, effective, and life-saving.”
Frames the law as animus-based and analogizes it to religion-based discrimination: “Imagine a law banning minors from services inconsistent with their religion.”
Rationale for Score:
A direct descendant of the Obergefell and Bostock line of reasoning. No concessions to the state’s justification. This makes Sotomayor the clear 0 anchor, serving as the opposing position to Thomas’s 25.
Barrett Concurrence – Score: 21
Mode: Textualist skepticism with institutionalist restraint
Key Language:
Rejects transgender individuals as a suspect class: “Transgender status is not defined by a trait that is…fixed and consistent across the group.”
Warns of judicial overreach in cultural conflicts: “The prospect of courts second-guessing legislative choices in this area should set off alarm bells.”
Supports rational basis, but distances from maximalist approaches.
Rationale for Score:
A moderate-to-strong conservative concurrence, deeply skeptical of suspect class expansion but stopping short of Thomas's originalism. Places her just right of Roberts and in line with a 21 score.
Alito Concurrence – Score: 23
Mode: Purist doctrinalist with a narrow view of equal protection
Key Language:
Declares: “What those cases have always meant by ‘sex’ is the status of having the genes of a male or female.”
Calls Bostock “controversial” and irrelevant: “There is no reason to apply Bostock’s methodology here.”
Assumes that the law targets transgender people but rejects that transgender status deserves any heightened scrutiny.
Rationale for Score:
Alito’s concurrence is doctrinally rigid and leans heavily into biological essentialism. In tone and doctrinal tightness, it mirrors his Dobbs opinion (24), but with slightly more concession to argumentation (“assume arguendo” approach), making 23 appropriate.