I admit it. I grew up believing that the Supreme Court (US) was a most august body. (Didn’t you?) We expected the serving judges had reached their decisions in a bias-free, rational process. Of course, I have watched various presidents nominate folks to that court that I would never let walk my dog, let alone adjudicate a case that affected me dearly. So, as you can tell, my regard for this august body has dropped more than a few notches. (Consider the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 08-205 (2010) or Bush v. Gore case (531 U.S. 98 (2000) and its sister case, Bush v. Palm Beach Canvassing Board 531 U.S. 70 (2000)).
Drs. Guimera and Sales-Pardo of the Public University of Tarragona (Universitat Rovira I Virgili, Spain) have published a paper in PlosOne that attempted to predict Supreme Court Justices’ votes based upon various computational models. They chose 150 cases from the Supreme Court from the Warren Court (1953) through the Rehnquist court (2004).
Their efforts were aimed at predicting a justice’s vote based upon other justice’s votes in the same case (using complex network analysis and affiliation networks). In a nutshell, they found that the votes were far more predictable than one would anticipate from an ideal court with independent judges. Moreover, this deviation from ideality (i.e., predictability) was more pronounced in 5-4 decisions. Interestingly, they found less they were less able to predict the votes when there was a Democratic (versus Republican) President. (Notice: That is different from who appointed the justices.)
To make their analysis a little easier to compute, the researchers limited their efforts to simple cases (all nine justices simply vote for the majority or dissent; so the Bush v. Gore et. al. cases were never to be included) and were provided to the public with full (and signed) opinions. If there were multiple issues, they only evaluated the primary issue in each of those cases.
In general, they found most of the justices were predictable. One outlier among all the justices in their study was Justice Arthur Goldberg, who was only 2% more predictable than expected for an ideal justice. Thurgood Marshall, on the other hand, was 64% more predictable than would be an ideal judge. (Note: Predictability has no and receives no bearing from the justice’s liberal or conservative beliefs. Justice John Stevens was relatively unpredictable in his votes, even though he was among the most liberal justices.) In general, justices that were appointed to the court early on in a Presidential term were more predictable than those chosen in the latter portion of the terms.
It turns out the block model is a more realistic one than the one-dimensional (liberal-conservative) models, as is often used to discern congressional behavior. The block model predicted the votes in 83 percent of the Supreme Court cases, where legal experts only predicted correctly 67.9 % and the case-content algorithm yielded a 66.7% agreement.
Who knew that our judges were more interested in getting along than reaching the proper decisions?
Very interesting indeed…it’s a worry. I would presume the same thing could be found here in Oz.
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I don’t know enough about the courts in Oz. But the High Court (about equivalent to the Supreme Court) is not a “for life” position, so there’s more change in the composition. For example, you have had about the same number of Chief Justices than our court- and yours is only 107 years old. I could not find an analysis of their decisions to make a scientific comparision.
Roy
Roy, is it that the judges are more interested in getting along or is it that they tended to vote consistently with their beliefs? And could the unpredictability of the liberal judge Arthur Goldberg could be explained by the fact that he would have differing views based on the particular issue?
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The implications of this study, Ann, is that the justices do tend to want to be “part of a group”. And, given what we know about Justice Goldberg (someone who resigned to satisfy the desire of a President to appoint someone else, served as UN Ambassador) and his legal career prior to serving on the court, we may assume he was a different character than most of our modern judges.
I look forward to the continued analysis that was implied by these two researchers.
Roy
Thanks for the info. I had no idea that eduactors in Spain had so much interest in our Supreme Court. So does this mean that we shouldn’t even worry about how we “assume” a justice will vote when a new one gets appointed?
Btw – I tried to right click to open the link to ‘PlosOne’ in a new window (while I was in the middle of leaving this comment) but you have a plugin that prevented me from doing that. I was curious to see what language it was written in. That’s an interesting plugin.
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Ileane:
No “right clicks” allowed. If you left click- it opens a new window automatically for you. I don’t block the information- I just won’t permit copying my blog. (I am NOT saying that’s what you wanted- I’m just explaining my policy. I can’t stop someone from retyping my blog- but I can at least make them think about it….) PlosOne is an English language journal.
Thanks for dropping in and leaving your comment. I had EXACTLY the same question- why did these folks decide to analyze the US Supreme Court. It’s my guess that our information is ready available (many other courts operate “in camera”, don’t print their full opinions, or may not have as many cases. The other reason is that there was some K street money involved…
Who knows? But, it certainly was elucidating.
Roy
Roy, I understand and I’ve been down that road before (getting my content copied). I’ve come to the conclusion that they always find a way to get their hands on it somehow. Here’s what I do, and you should consider this as well, I always have internal links to my other blog posts so no matter where they take my content, it will always link back to my blog. This is also great for SEO too. I try to put the link in the first sentence or the first paragraph.
Hope that helps!
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Thanks for your suggestions, Ileane. But, I’ll stick with this. It works. And, the links work with regular clicks, too.
Roy
I believe that the judges (and the doctors, and the lawyers, etc…) are human beings, having everyday private problems, trying to get along, meet society’s expectations rather than reaching proper decisions every single time. On the other hand, what is a proper decision? Isn’t that in line with the public expectations?
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Anna:
When it comes to the Supreme Court, it is expected that the decisions rendered are in concert with the US Constitution. That has NO bearing upon what people expect. It is why the Supreme Court decides its cases – both in determining outcome and in choosing upon which to rule- on strictly constitutional grounds. Unfortunately, this current Supreme Court seems not to be following that criteria. That actually makes it wrong- whether it meets people’s expectations or not.
Roy