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Predicting US Supreme Court Justice Votes
New submitter Pierre Bezukhov writes "Researchers Roger Guimera and Marta Sales-Pardo of Spain set out to ask whether one of the nine Supreme Court justices could be plucked from the bench and replaced with an algorithm that does not take into account the law or the case at issue, but does take into account the other justices' votes and the court's record. These researchers say their computational models, using methods developed to analyze complex social networks, are just as accurate in predicting a justice's decision as forecasts from legal experts. 'We find that Supreme Court justices are significantly more predictable than one would expect from "ideally independent" justices in "ideal courts,"' that is, free agents independently evaluating cases on their merits, free of ideology, the study said."
I wish a law clerk had written the last sentence of the summary.
It might have had a chance of being intelligible.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Now Thomas is going to the Halting-Problem-Buster trick, by getting a copy of this program and ruling the opposite of whatever it predicts he's going to do.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Algorithms like this have to be modeled after the historical decisions that the justices decided upon. So of course they accurately "predict" the historical decisions. So how do they know how accurate these things are for future decisions? I couldn't RTFA because the damn article isn't loading on my crappy government Internet connection.
Wait, what? Supreme court justices have political opinions? Who would have thunk it.
Law Clerks write the decisions, but a good judge decides what the decision will be. In SCOTUS, the judges get bench briefs from their clerks before oral argument, plus briefs from either side. Then they retire after the case is argued and go around the table, with the least senior justice speaking first and giving his impression of the case / comments / where he'll come out. It goes in order of reverse seniority so that the senior justice speaks last in order to get the benefit of hearing everyone else first. Then they have clerks write opinions based on their decision. Occasionally there is a realignment after reading the opinions that are drafted.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
The whole point of the Supreme Court is interpretation. Interpretation of how a law applies to a given situation (and if it even does). This involves more than just case knowledge, it relies on all their experience behind the bench, as well as their own beliefs. The justices are ruling on how they think the law applies, based upon their own knowledge of case law, the language of the law in question, and their belief as to the intention of that law. Impartiality is possible in application; it is much harder, if not impossible, in interpretation.
And this ignores the fact that Supreme Court Justices are in fact political appointees and are selected based upon how they ruled on given cases (ie, in a way the President and majority of Congress ideologically supports). So even selection, well, selects towards those with a certain bias depending on which party is in control of the government at the time of appointment.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The whole point of the legal system is that courts don1t just hand out verdicts randomly, but according to the laws available for everyone. Without that, people wouldn't know how to act legally. In fact, ideally one should be able to predict what a courts decision would be in every situation. unfortunately, the legal systems of the world are too complicated/contradictory for that.
I used to work with a group that simulated the folding of proteins.
You'd take an assortment of protein sequences and train a neural net on how they folded. Then you try to use that to predict the folding of another different protein that wasn't in the set you trained it on.
But, in this case, they don't try to predict the behavior of an independent case, they use it to predict the behavior of one of the 8 items (justices) they trained the simulation on. That's fine as an exercise in simulation, but using it to reach conclusions on intent and bias is a real reach. I suspect the journalists hyped that part of it a lot more than the researchers themselves.
That's underwhelming enough as is. But what do you use as a measure of how "independent" a judge is?
Assuming no relationship between decisions is ludicrous. On many items that aren't terribly controversial, Ginsburg and Scalia, for example, would rule similarly just because they are trained judges with a background in US law.
Similarly, you wouldn't be surprised if Krugman and Friedman agreed on the proper answer to a question from an Econ 101 textbook, regardless that they would differ massively on more complex issues.
Add to that, the Supreme Court doesn't get the expected and routine "no-brainer" type decisions. It's where the ones with thorny legal interpretation and constitutional issues end up.
I'd be really surprised if you didn't have a correlation between how one particular justice votes and how the rest of the justices vote.
I liked my time in law school. Nothing pissed off a law-worshiper more than pointing out that the Supreme Court was a means to code unreasoned opinion into law, as the decisions use law to justify opinions, the opposite of what the courts assert (where they say they come to their opinions through examining the law, rather than force their personal opinions into law). The legal experts have been able to predict not only the direction in which they vote, but also the reasons they would give. But it's interesting to learn that an algorithm is sufficient, with no analyzation of the facts and law necessary.
Learn to love Alaska
Forgive me, but I'm a touch incredulous at that statement.
Not my recollection (60s through now) at all, especially the Warren court and the early 70s.
The Warren court was pretty unabashedly activist. Go read up on it. They saw themselves as addressing needed social injustices via court decision. You may agree with what they decided (and many times it was needed badly as the civil rights cases and some of the liability) but that's the very definition of judicial activism.
How do you think they didn't overturn precedent on Brown vs Board of Education and the other cases that were the very core of the victories of the civil rights movement? In Brown, they specifically went against previous decisions (Plessey vs Ferguson) that said segregation was acceptable. In Brown, they said seperate but equal was not.
How was Roe vs Wade not a change from the longstanding tendency to leave medical regulation to the states? Etc, etc, the list is a long one. Look at liability law as well. there was major overruling of standing precedent.
Just because a decision was a good or needed one doesn't bear on whether it was activist or precedent preserving.
What you're saying just doesn't agree with history.
You have conservative Christian 'law schools' that focus specifically on teaching how to use and apply law toward the explicit agenda of moving it in the direction of biblical principles. By definition, they are designed to only turn out activists. It is their express stated intent, and the way those schools promote themselves as different from traditional law schools they compete with. Is it any surprise then that the only real sizable pool of 'activist' judges are conservative/christian supremacist types?