This chapter details the novel methodology used to empirically compare Supreme Court rulings with public opinion. Moving beyond traditional measures that focus on individual justice ideology, this approach is designed to track the term-to-term ideological alignment between the Court’s policy outputs and the preferences of the American public. The foundation of this method is a series of five annual surveys (2020–2024) fielded to nationally representative samples. These surveys ask respondents their views on the underlying policy issues in a dozen or more of the most salient cases before the Court each term, translating complex legal disputes into accessible questions.</p>To synthesize this data, the authors employ ideal point estimation. This statistical technique jointly scales the survey responses and the justices’ votes, placing respondents, individual justices, and the Court’s aggregate rulings onto a common liberal-conservative continuum. A key innovation is the yearly rescaling of these estimates, which sets the average American’s ideology as a fixed benchmark at zero. This allows for a direct and intuitive measurement of how far the Court’s rulings deviate from the public mainstream in any given term. The chapter concludes by validating these new measures, demonstrating their strong correlation with established Martin–Quinn scores.