ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

[G]iven his years of judicial experience, we wanted to see what else the data could tell us about Gorsuch from an analytics perspective. Applying data science to Gorsuch's cases, could we see, for example, that he cites the centrist Kennedy more frequently than fellow originalist Scalia? Can data uncover insights that escaped the common understanding?

To start, we took a deep dive into Ravel's Judge Analytics platform to determine how similar Gorsuch might be to Scalia, since he is in consideration for filling his seat. We developed a "Scalia Score," in which we looked at each judge on Trump's shortlist of nominees, their total number of citations, and then calculated how many times these judges cited to opinions authored by Scalia. For this tally, we counted only the unique instance of from/to opinion pairings, regardless of how many times a ruling referenced the cited opinion.

More than any judge on Trump's list, Gorsuch tops our ranking with the highest Scalia Score, which serves as another indicator of his ideology and conservative bonafides. Yet, surprisingly, he comes in second to Merrick Garland, who was President Obama's nominee.

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