Analysis of high court shows just 29 abortion rulings

Keith Epstein and Doug Stanley of the Tampa Tribune analyzed Supreme Court voting data archived by Michigan State University political science Professor Harold J. Spaeth, finding that “since 1953, the Supreme Court has formally ruled on abortion, a privacy issue, only 29 times. Abortion-related cases account for only 0.5 percent of all rulings handed down by the court since then.” The paper’s analysis suggests that senators interested in probing nominee Samuel Alito’s views would do better to ask about topics such as “search and seizure, on which the court ruled 244 times, corporate liability (187 times), federal taxation (162 times) and antitrust cases (161 times).”