Consequences of Supreme Court Decisions Upholding Individual Constitutional Rights

External Influences on Supreme Court Decisions

Plainly constitutional: the upholding of plain tobacco packaging by the High Court of Australia.

In November 2011, Australia became the first country in the world to legislate for “plain packaging” of tobacco products. As of December 1, 2012, the packaging of tobacco products sold in Australia must be a standard, drab dark brown color; and the printing of tobacco company logos, brand imagery, colors, or promotional text on that packaging and on individual tobacco products is prohibited. Wh...

Relating Values in a Series of Supreme Court Decisions

In recent years it has become quite usual to view legal decisions in terms of consideration of the values affected by deciding the case for or against a particular party. Often deciding for, say, the plaintiff will promote one value at the expense of another. Precedents are then supposed to guide the way in which this conflict is resolved. In this paper we will consider a series of cases explor...

Supreme Court

Th ere is no doubt that the U.S. Supreme Court has in-fl uenced the politics of the country. As a public body, the Court is a highly visible part of the federal government. Th is has always been so, even when the justices met briefl y twice a year in the drafty basement of the Capitol. Yet the idea that the Court itself is a political institution is controversial. Th e justices themselves have ...

Crowdsourcing accurately and robustly predicts Supreme Court decisions

Scholars have increasingly investigated “crowdsourcing” as an alternative to expert-based judgment or purely data-driven approaches to predicting the future. Under certain conditions, scholars have found that crowdsourcing can outperform these other approaches. However, despite interest in the topic and a series of successful use cases, relatively few studies have applied empirical model thinki...