Overburdened judges

Evaluating Judges

Much of the interest in empirical studies of judges lies in the comparison of actual to ideal behavior. When we ask what makes a good judge or whether a judge rightly decided a case, we implicitly compare the judge's decisions to a normative standard. In some instances, the content of the normative standard is uncontroversial and its application straightforward. Hence, a trial judge who sentenc...

Judging the judges: Evaluating the performance of international gymnastics judges

Judging a gymnastics routine is a noisy process, and the performance of judges varies widely. The International Federation of Gymnastics (FIG), in collaboration with Longines and the Université de Neuchâtel, is designing and implementing an improved statistical engine to analyze the performance of gymnastics judges during and after major competitions like the Olympic Games and the World Champio...

Judges, Expertise, and Analogy

Political scientists have shown that one can anticipate how a judge will decide a case more often than chance, or a reading of the facts, might allow by using various predictors such as party affiliation, gender, or the judge’s own decisions on earlier similar cases. The simplest explanation for such behavior is that judges first decide what they want the outcome of the case to be, then go back...

Judges System for Classifiers Specialization

In this paper we designed and implemented a new ensemble of classifiers based on a sequence of classifiers which were specialized in regions of the training dataset where errors of its trained homologous are concentrated. In order to separate this regions, and to determine the aptitude of each classifier to properly respond to a new case, it was used another set of classifiers built hierarchica...

The Debate over the Selection and Retention of Judges: How Judges Can Ride the Wave