Tag: Judicial Decision Making

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Announcing the Beta Pre-Release of Legal Language Explorer.com < Search the History of ANY Phrase in the Decisions of the United States Supreme Court >

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In partnership with Michigan State University College of Law and Emory Law, today we announce the Beta Pre-Release of a New Web Interface – LegalLanguageExplorer.com. We are just getting started here with this project and anticipate many features that will be rolling out to you in the near future. Please feel free to send us your feedback / comments.

BASIC FEATURES:

Instant Return of a Time Series Plot for One or More Comma Separated Phrases.  The default search is currently interstate commerce, railroad, deed (with plots for each of the term displayed simultaneously).

Feel free to test out ANY phrase of Up to Four Words in length.

Here are just a few of our favorites:

Clear and Present Danger
Habeas Corpus
Custodial Interrogation
Due Process
Unconstitutional
Property
Privacy

SCOPE OF COVERAGE:
In the current version, we are offering results for EVERY decision of the United States Supreme Court (1791-2005).  We plan to soon expand to other corpora including the U.S. Court of Appeals, etc.

FULL TEXT CASE ACCESS:
Each of the Phrases you search will be highlighted in Blue.  If you click on these highlighted phrases you will be taken to the full list of United States Supreme Court decisions that employ this phrase:

ADVANCED FEATURES:
Check out the advanced features including normalization and alternative graphing tools.

PAPER:
Daniel Martin Katz, Michael J. Bommarito II, Julie Seaman, Adam Candeub & Eugene Agichtein, Legal N-Grams? A Simple Approach to Track the ‘Evolution’ of Legal Language in Proceedings of Jurix: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (Vienna 2011) available at  http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1971953

PRESENTATION & HELPFUL TUTORIAL:
Click on the Image Below and You Will Be Directed to our Presentation at 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems ( Jurix 2011 – Vienna )
This offers some motivation for the project as well as a Brief Slide Based Tutorial Designed to Highlight Various Functions Available on the Site.

 

TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION:
Michael J. Bommarito, Building Legal Language Explorer: Interactivity and Drill-Down, noSQL and SQL available at http://www.michaelbommarito.com/blog/2011/12/16/building-legal-language-explorer-interactivity-and-drill-down-nosql-and-sql/

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Oyez @ Chicago Kent Releases Free OyezToday App for IPhone

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Kudos to Jerry Goldman, the other folks at the Oyez Project as well as the Chicago-Kent College of Law for making this free resource available to the public!

From the description: “OYEZTODAY at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law offers you the latest information and media on the current business of the Supreme Court of the United States. OYEZTODAY provides: easy-to-grasp abstracts for every case granted review, timely and searchable audio of oral arguments + transcripts, and up-to-date summaries of the Court’s most recent decisions including the Court’s full opinions. You will have access to all this information on your iPhone with the ability to share reactions on Facebook, Twitter, or by email. (Recordings of opinion announcements from the bench will follow when the Court releases these files to the National Archives at the start of the Court’s next Term).  Chicago-Kent is proud to provide this free service to enhance the public’s understanding of the Supreme Court and current legal controversies.”


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Netflix Challenge for SCOTUS Prediction?

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During our break from blogging, Ian Ayers offered a very interesting post over a Freakonomics entitled “Prediction Markets vs. Super Crunching: Which Can Better Predict How Justice Kennedy Will Vote?” In general terms, the post compares the well known statistical model offered by Martin-Quinn to the new Supreme Court Fantasy League created by Josh Blackman. We were particularly interested in a sentence located at end of the post … “[T]he fantasy league predictions would probably be more accurate if market participants had to actually put their money behind their predictions (as with intrade.com).”  This point is well taken. Extending the idea of having some “skin in the game,” we wondered what sort of intellectual returns could be generated for the field of quantitative Supreme Court prediction by some sort of Netflix style SCOTUS challenge.

The Martin-Quinn model has significantly advanced the field of quantitative analysis of the United States Supreme Court. However, despite all of the benefits the model has offered, it is unlikely to be the last word on the question. While only time will tell, an improved prediction algorithm might very well be generated through the application of ideas in machine learning and via incorporation of additional components such as text, citations, etc.

With significant financial sum at stake … even far less than the real Netflix challenge … it is certainly possible that a non-trivial mprovement could be generated. In a discussion among a few of us here at the Michigan CSCS lab, we generated the following non-exhaustive set of possible ground rules for a Netflix Style SCOTUS challenge:

  1. To be unseated, the winning team should be required to make a non-trivial improvement upon the out-of-sample historical success of the Martin-Quinn Model.
  2. To prevent overfitting, the authors of this non-trivial improvement should be required to best the existing model for some prospective period.
  3. All of those who submit agree to publish their code in a standard programming language (C, Java, Python, etc.) with reasonable commenting / documentation.

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The Supreme Court Open Infrastructure Project Meeting

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Wash U CERL Meeting

Mike and I just spent a couple days a Washington University’s Center for Empirical Research in the Law for a meeting related to the Supreme Court Open Infrastructure Project. The meeting featured a number of great folks with cool data projects. The discussion was very fruitful and it is clear that the end product is going to offer a wide range of data relevant resources.  We are looking forward to contribute to the project in the months to come!

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Statistical Time Machines

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Time_Machines

So, I was a bit late on this … However, it is a really cool idea and thus I want to flag it for those who might have missed it.  As covered over at SCOTUS Blog and ELS Blog, the November 12th Wall Street Journal features a story entitled “Statistical Time Travel Helps to Answer What-Ifs.”  Of interest to legal scholars, Professors Andrew Martin and Kevin Quinn discuss a series of what-ifs including how today’s Supreme Court would have voted on Roe v. Wade … Check it out!

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Hustle and Flow: A Social Network Analysis of the American Federal Judiciary [Repost from 3/25]

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Zoom on Network

Together with Derek Stafford from the University of Michigan Department of Political Science, Hustle and Flow: A Social Network Analysis of the American Federal Judiciary represents our initial foray into Computational Legal Studies. The full paper contains a number of interesting visualizations where we draw various federal judges together on the basis of their shared law clerks (1995-2004). The screen print above is a zoom very center of the center of the network.  Yellow Nodes represent Supreme Court Justices, Green Nodes represent Circuit Court Justices, Blue Nodes represent District Court Justices.

There exist many high quality formal models of judicial decision making including those considering decisions rendered by judges in judicial hierarchy, whistle blowing, etc. One component which might meaningfully contribute to the extent literature is the rigorous consideration of the social and professional relationships between jurists and the impacts (if any) these relationships impose upon outcomes. Indeed, from a modeling standpoint, we believe the “judicial game” is a game on a graph–one where an individual strategic jurist must take stock of time evolving social topology upon which he or she is operating. Even among judges of equal institutional rank, we observe jurists with widely variant levels social authority (specifically social authority follows a power law distribution).

So what does all of this mean? Take whistle blowing — the power law distribution implies that if the average judge has a whistle, the “super-judges” we identify within the paper could be said to have an air horn. With the goal of enriching positive political theory / formal modeling of the courts, we believe the development of a positive theory of judicial social structure can enrich our understanding of the dynamics of prestige and influence. In addition, we believe, at least in part, “judicial peer effects” can help legal doctrine socially spread across the network. In that vein, here is a view of our operationalization of the social landscape … a wide shot of the broader network visualized using the Kamada-Kawai visualization algorithm:

Here is the current abstract for the paper: Scholars have long asserted that social structure is an important feature of a variety of societal institutions. As part of a larger effort to develop a fully integrated model of judicial decision making, we argue that social structure-operationalized as the professional and social connections between judicial actors-partially directs outcomes in the hierarchical federal judiciary. Since different social structures impose dissimilar consequences upon outputs, the precursor to evaluating the doctrinal consequences that a given social structure imposes is a descriptive effort to characterize its properties. Given the difficulty associated with obtaining appropriate data for federal judges, it is necessary to rely upon a proxy measure to paint a picture of the social landscape. In the aggregate, we believe the flow of law clerks reflects a reasonable proxy for social and professional linkages between jurists. Having collected available information for all federal judicial law clerks employed by an Article III judge during the “natural” Rehnquist Court (1995-2004), we use these roughly 19,000 clerk events to craft a series of network based visualizations.   Using network analysis, our visualizations and subsequent analytics provide insight into the path of peer effects in the federal judiciary. For example, we find the distribution of “degrees” is highly skewed implying the social structure is dictated by a small number of socially prominent actors. Using a variety of centrality measures, we identify these socially prominent jurists. Next, we draw from the extant complexity literature and offer a possible generative process responsible for producing such inequality in social authority. While the complete adjudication of a generative process is beyond the scope of this article, our results contribute to a growing literature documenting the highly-skewed distribution of authority across the common law and its constitutive institutions.

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Citation Analysis in Continental Jurisdictions

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Citation Analysis

Anton Geist has posted Using Citation Analysis Techniques for Computer-Assisted Legal Research in Continental Jurisdictions to the SSRN.  While this is certainly longer than most papers, we believe it offers a good review of the broader information retrieval and law literature.  In addition, it offers some empirical insight into citation patterns within continental jurisdictions. The findings in this paper are similar to those shown in important papers by Thomas Smith in The Web of the Law and by David Post & Michael Eisen in How Long is the Coastline of Law? Thoughts on the Fractal Nature of Legal Systems. 

In our view, the next step for this research is to determine whether the pattern does indeed follow a power law distribution.  Specifically, there exists a Maximum Likelihood based test developed in the applied physics paper Power-law Distributions in Empirical Data by Aaron Clauset, Cosma Shalizi and Mark Newman which can help adjudicate whether the detected pattern represents a highly skewed distribution or is indeed a power law.

Either way, we are excited by this paper as we believe comparative research is absolutely critical to broader theory development.

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Institutional Rules, Strategic Behavior, Agenda Control & Inferences — Explaining Chief Justice Roberts Anomalous Decision in NAMUNDO

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Punt Team

Agenda Control and Careful Inferences

What are the class of potential inferences one should draw when the Chief Justice behaves in a manner which would appear at odds with our prior understandings of his jurisprudence? As I have argued in my previous article Institutional Rules, Strategic Behavior and the Legacy of Chief Justice William Rehnquist: Setting the Record Straight on Dickerson v. United States, there is significant reason to be careful about the class of inferences one draws under conditions similar to those accompanying yesterday’s decision in NAMUNDO v. Holder.

A significant strain of the literature in political science is devoted to studying the power of agenda control. The primary power of Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court is the power of opinion assignment. This includes the right of the Chief to assign to himself the task of opinion writing.  Of course, this authority is qualifed as it only applies when he finds himself in the majority coalition.  If he finds himself outside of the majority, the Senior Associate Justice in the majority is permitted to exercise this important authority.  

The opinion assignment norm provides a significant incentive for the Chief Justice to behave “strategically.”  Specifically, in instances where the majority of the court is unwilling to support his preferred outcome, the Chief still has an incentive to join the majority in order to do “damage control.”  For example, he can attempt to author a watered-down opinion or an opinion which leaves the major substantive issues for another day.  

The Ghost of Dickerson v. United States

Consider as an illustrative example, Justice Rehnquist’s behavior in the 2000 case, Dickerson v. United States.  In Dickerson, the Supreme Court was called to consider the ultimate constitutionality of its landmark decision in Miranda v. Arizona. Prior to the Court’s decision, even Miranda’s strongest supporters had expressed significant concern regarding its continued viability. As I sat in the audience on the day of the Dickerson decision, this concern was only heightened when Justice Rehnquist indicated he would deliver the court’s majority opinion.  

Chief Justice Rehnquist prior Miranda related jurisprudence indicated a significant hostility to the Court landmark 1966 ruling. In fact, in every decision prior to Miranda he either voted to limit or undercut the Court’s Miranda doctrine.  In 57 out of 57 prior cases, the Miranda doctrine had no friend in William Rehnquist. Between his decision in Dickerson and his death, the Rehnquist-led Court considered 5 major Miranda-related cases. In each of these cases, the Chief resumed exactly where he left off prior to Dickerson.  He consistently voted to undercut the holding and virtually ignored his own Dickerson opinion.       

Chief Justice Rehnquist’s former law clerk, Ted Cruz, writing about the Dickerson decision in a eulogy in the Harvard Law Review, essentially acknowledged the strategic nature of the decision “it was the best that could be gotten from the current members of the Court.” From a doctrinal perspective, his decision was fairly opaque. For example, in responding to questions regarding Dickerson’s logical underpinning Ted Cruz stated, “do not ask why, and please, never, ever, ever cite this opinion for any reason.”  

The Strategic Decision in NAMUNDO v. Holder?

Nearly four years after the death of Chief Justice Rehnquist, another socially important decision would be surprisingly authored by a Chief Justice who initially appeared hostile to the question at issue.  This time it was Chief Justice John Roberts, a jurist initially socialized in the ways of the high court in the early 1980’s chambers of then Justice William Rehnquist.

In yesterday’s decision in NAMUNDO v. Holder, Chief Justice Roberts authored an 8-1 decision. Leading election law scholars including Professor Rick Hasen have initially described it as “an interpretation of the Act virtually no lawyer thought was plausible.” The lesson from Dickerson and other such cases is strategic behavior on the part of the Chief is always possible. Once it is apparent he does not have the requisite votes to reach his desired policy outcome–what is a strategic Chief Justice to do?  Do damage control, limit the core holding or as Professor Gerken has characterized yesterday’s ruling, “punt.”  

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Visualization of the Ideological History of the Supreme Court

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USSC MQ Scores

Here is a cool visual for the Martin-Quinn Scores. For those of you not familiar, the Martin-Quinn paper and “MQ Scores” represented a significant breakthrough in the field of judicial politics. On that note, Stephen Jessee & Alexander Tahk have done a nice job both bringing their data up to date and extending their work.  For those interested, click on the visual above and check out all of the relevant links contained within this post.  

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An Exchange in Need of Empirics and an Analytical or Computational Model

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section 5

On a recent flight, I read Jeffrey Toobin’s New Yorker Article on Chief Justice Roberts entitled “No More Mr. Nice Guy”.  The exchange quoted above is drawn from this article. While I believe it is appropriate to engage empirical data where available, the underlying discussion is not one exclusively subjectable to empirical inquiry.  Rather, it is, at least in part, a question in need of a formal theoretic model. Justice Roberts and Mr. Katyal are implicitly discussing a “state of the world” not yet realized but which would be realized if the statute were not to exist. What would benefit the discussion is principled manner to adjudicate between these two inferences drawn above.  Namely, it would be useful to fully evaluate what behavior would likely follow if the statute were not to exist.

There exist a variety of mathematical modeling techniques which could inject some much needed rigor into the above discussion. To my knowledge, such an applied model has yet to be offered.  The Supreme Court’s decision in the matter is soon forthcoming. Given the nature of the exchange above, there is reason to believe that if Chief Justice Roberts prevails ….we will get our model as the “state of the world” discussed above will no longer be hypothetical….