A Supreme Court Justice Death Calculator

January 15, 2013 in Daily Bulletin

Chris Kirk and Stephen Laniel at Slate have used data from the Centers for Disease Control to create a calculator that looks at the likelihood of Supreme Court justices passing away in the next four years. Centives played around with the calculator and this is what we found:

  • There’s a 63% chance that at least one justice will die in the next four years.
  • There’s a 45% chance that it’ll be a conservative member that passes away.
  • There’s a 33% chance that it’ll be a liberal.
  • Justice Anthony Kennedy and Justice Antonin Scalia are the least likely to survive until 2017 with an 18% chance that one of them will pass before then.
  • There’s a 0.05% chance that five justices will pass before Obama’s second term is over – giving him the opportunity to stack the Supreme Court with like-minded individuals.

You can try out the calculator yourself over here. (Your numbers might differ as the calculator seems to recalculate the percentages each time. We averaged out ten attempts for each of the scenarios outlined above.)

Source: Slate