The 2020 U.S. Supreme Court and Political Identity

Statistical mechanics of the US Supreme Court

We build simple models for the distribution of voting patterns in a group, using the Supreme Court of the United States as an example. The least structured, or maximum entropy, model that is consistent with the observed pairwise correlations among justices’ votes is equivalent to an Ising spin glass. While all correlations (perhaps surprisingly) are positive, the effective pairwise interactions...

Dialogues in US Supreme Court Oral Hearings

Dialogue protocols in Artificial Intelligence and Law have become increasingly stylised, intended to examine the logic of particular legal phenomena such as burden of proof, rather than the procedures within which these phenomena occur. In this paper we will return to the original idea of using dialogue to model particular procedures by examining some very particular dialogues those found in or...

US Supreme Court confronts 'right to die'.

US Supreme Court v Obamacare: round 2.

The US Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) was designed to expand health insurance coverage in three major ways: allowing young people through to age 25 to be included on their parents’ policies; expanding the Medicaid program for poor people to include those earning up to 133% of the federal poverty level; and providing federal subsidies to help low and middle income people afford mandated healt...

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 ...