US pro-choice groups prepare for fight over Supreme Court nominee

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...

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...

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...

Inferring Multi-Dimensional Ideal Points for US Supreme Court Justices

In Supreme Court parlance and the political science literature, an ideal point positions a justice in a continuous space and can be interpreted as a quantification of the justice’s policy preferences. We present an automated approach to infer such ideal points for justices of the US Supreme Court. This approach combines topic modeling over case opinions with the voting (and endorsing) behavior ...