The popular method of ideal point estimation provides empirical legal scholars with spatial representations of the Supreme Court justices that help elucidate ideological inclinations and voting behavior. This is done primarily in one dimension, where politics dominates, though recent work details a second dimension capturing differing attitudes on the authority of various legal actors. This paper explores a new network-theoretic tree-based method for visualizing the relationships between the justices, based on their voting records, that allows scholars to study the intricate branching structure of the Court. It is shown how this tool can be used to uncover periods in the Court’s history where the balance on the bench fractured in unusual and interesting ways. Moreover, by defining several tree-based measures and charting their evolution over time, a picture emerges that throughout the past fifty years the Court became increasingly linear and bipolar, dividing along political lines.

理想点估计的流行方法为经验法律学者提供了最高法院法官的空间表示，有助于阐明意识形态倾向和投票行为。这主要是在一个维度上完成的，其中政治占主导地位，尽管最近的工作详细描述了第二个维度，捕捉了对不同法律行为者权威的不同态度。本文探索了一种新的基于网络理论树的方法，用于可视化法官之间的关系，基于他们的投票记录，使学者们能够研究法院复杂的分支结构。它展示了如何使用该工具来揭示法院历史上板凳上的平衡以不寻常且有趣的方式破裂的时期。此外，通过定义几个基于树的度量并绘制它们随时间的演变，