Algorithm Predicts US Supreme Court Decisions 70% of Time

stephendavion writes A legal scholar says he and colleagues have developed an algorithm that can predict, with 70 percent accuracy, whether the US Supreme Court will uphold or reverse the lower-court decision before it. "Using only data available prior to the date of decision, our model correctly identifies 69.7 percent of the Court's overall affirm and reverse decisions and correctly forecasts 70.9% of the votes of individual justices across 7,700 cases and more than 68,000 justice votes," Josh Blackman, a South Texas College of Law scholar, wrote on his blog Tuesday.

Comments

not really that hard, theoretically

[argStyopa]

The US Constitution is only about 4 pages, 4400 words (and the bulk of that is structural & procedural minutiae about the US government).
The role of the USSC is simply resolving if a law does or does not conform to the US Constitution.

Given those relatively limited boundaries, it shouldn't be that complex of an issue to predict algorithmically the results of a given judicial ruling, one would think. (The devil's in the details about parsing meaning and context.)

Of course, I believe phrases like "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" are indisputably clear, and I'm astonished that people can find convoluted ways to try to tear it apart syntactically.and semantically.