From this data, scholars have inferred the ideological leanings of each justice and how the justices are likely to vote on upcoming cases. For example, Segal and Cover found a strong correlation (r=0.80) between justices' perceived ideological perspectives on civil liberties and civil rights issues as attributed to them in elite newspaper editorials written just before their confirmation (their Segal–Cover score) and their later votes in the study period 1953–1988. Epstein, Walker, and Dixon found they could explain and predict rulings in criminal justice cases (in the study period 1946–1986) using a simple model with four inputs: the political party affiliation of the majority of justices, the political party affiliation of the current president (representing the current political climate), the Supreme Court rulings in criminal justice cases in the previous year, and the percent of criminal cases the Court decides to hear in the current year (how much interest they take in the issue). In this analysis, the political party affiliation of the majority of justices provided about one-fourth of the predictive power. Bonica et al. utilized the ideology of the law clerks hired by federal judges (as estimated by the law clerks' political donations) to estimate the ideology of the judges themselves.
