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 don't get it...

[adamchou]

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.

Re:Fantastic

[DJRumpy]

Actually, Scalia was found to be the most activist with Thomas running a close second. Conservative judges were also found to me more activist (willing to strike down rulings that lean towards a liberal bias). There's an interesting study on judicial partisanship that was done over 20 years of cases. The old conservative class of 'Liberal Activists Judges" turns out to not be entirely true after all, but rather leaning more towards a conservative trend towards begin activist.

http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2008/08/04_sunstein.html [harvard.edu]

Obvious for the last 100 years

[AK Marc]

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.

Re:Fantastic

[magarity]

Actually, Scalia was found to be the most activist with Thomas running a close second. Conservative judges were also found to me more activist (willing to strike down rulings that lean towards a liberal bias)

There are two main types of Federal justices: originalists and activists. An activist is not one who rules contrary to prior decisions. An activist justice is one who rules according to his/her view of how things out to be in the modern world. An originalist rules according to how he/she thinks the founders of the country would have thought of the matter. Neither Scalia nor Thomas can be "most activist" or even activist at all; both are well known for quoting historical sources as the basis for their decisions.