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Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

To my knowledge, the precedent is to replace "whoever left the bench" with "whoever is likely to agree with the current President's party".

Are there any examples where a liberal president nominated a conservative or vice-versa?

(I'm not talking about situations where someone was appointed as a conservative and moved gradually left, which actually happens to all justices.)

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A liberal would never elect a conservative and vice versa, but there's an expectation to maintain the court's approximate balance (which is why Scalia's death is such a big deal). So if a very right-leaning justice stepped down under a liberal president, he'd elect a center / center-left justice. If the most left-wing justice in the world stepped down, then a left-wing president could elect the most left-leaning person.

By no means a rule, but a tradition at least.

Can you provide an example of when this has happened?

The West Wing... That counts right?

Do you think Scalia moved gradually left? I've always considered him to be insanely consistent.

Sometimes "left" and "right" are useful labels, and sometimes not.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/antonin-scalia-fighter-priva...

He was intensely conservative.

Make of this what you will: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Graph_of...

As tptacek said, political labels aren't necessarily objective, so this graph would differ depending on the methodology. It's also a little harder to measure justices' leanings because there are so few data points.

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