Stacked area chart showing the share of conservative and liberal court decisions by term. The Supreme Court's previous term was the most conservative term in over a decade.
We use the Supreme Court Database’s definition of liberal and conservative, which usually coincides with the terms’ common usage, though not always, such as with issues like freedom of speech and religious liberty. For cases that touch multiple issue areas, we use the one the Database coded as primary. We drop the small number of cases coded as “unspecifiable,” wherein a liberal or conservative direction could not be identified.