Judicial Attitudes and Voting Behavior: The 1961 Term of the United States Supreme Court

Judicial Attitudes and Voting Behavior: the 1961 Term of the United States

Lawyers, political scientists, and other social scientists share an interest in seeking to understand how complex social relationships and patterns of human interaction can be studied so as to increase our stockpile of social knowledge about law and the policy-making processes through which it is formulated. They are not agreed, however, as to how this goal best may be realized. Recollection of...

Confirmation Bias in the United States Supreme Court Judicial Database

We ask whether the widely used direction of decision and direction of vote variables in the United States Supreme Court Judicial Database (USSCJD) are contaminated by confirmation bias, or have been affected by expectations about the likely effects of judicial preferences on case outcomes. Using a sample of generally comparable cases, we find evidence that the assignment of issue codes to these...

The Median Justice on the United States Supreme Court

A general approach for predicting the behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States

Building on developments in machine learning and prior work in the science of judicial prediction, we construct a model designed to predict the behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States in a generalized, out-of-sample context. To do so, we develop a time-evolving random forest classifier that leverages unique feature engineering to predict more than 240,000 justice votes and 28,000 cas...

Predicting the Behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States: A General Approach

Building upon developments in theoretical and applied machine learning, as well as the efforts of various scholars including Guimerà and Sales-Pardo (2011), Ruger et al. (2004), and Martin et al. (2004), we construct a model designed to predict the voting behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States. Using the extremely randomized tree method first proposed in Geurts et al. (2006), a meth...