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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.
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.
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.
That is interesting, but from your usage, it appears that you misunderstand what being an "activist" judge means. An "activist" judge is one who attempts to create law in the courtroom, as opposed to evaluating existing law. It is not a "left vs. right", "liberal vs. conservative" concept.