Tag: Judicial Decision Making

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Judge Sonia Sotomayor ⇒ Justice Sotomayor?

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Justice Sotomayor?

Justice Souter’s recently announced retirement has generated significant speculation regarding the potential nominee President Obama might select.    

Barring some unknown skeleton in her closet, if President Obama seeks to (1) select a Federal Court of Appeals Judge and (2) increase the diversity of the Court on multiple dimensions …. well … Judge Sotomayor would have to be the frontrunner.  

The picture and graph statistics pictured above are drawn from our paper Hustle and Flow: A Social Network Analysis of the American Federal Judiciary.  In the paper, we offer a mapping of the social topology of the American Federal Judiciary.  Built upon data aggregated over the Natural Rehnquist Court (1995-2004), we find Judge Sotomayor holds a position of significant social prominence.  

To read more on operationalization, etc.—click on the slide above or click here.

A number of commentators have suggested President Obama might forgo nominating a sitting judge — instead choosing an academic or politician.  This is certainly a possibility and in that vein let me reveal my bias in favor of Gov. Jennifer Granholm (for whom I formerly worked). 

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Justice Souter to Retire….Possible Replacements?…Here is a Mapping of Socially Prominent Jurists in the American Federal Judiciary

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American Federal Judiciary

NPR’s Nina Totenberg is reporting that Justice Souter is planning to retire at the end of the current Supreme Court Term.  As noted in the NPR report, the short list of replacements may include Elena Kagan, Diane Wood and/or Sonia Sotomayor (who is in the network above near Justice Stevens).  If President Obama decides to look beyond this early short list, he might consider one of the socially prominent federal jurist mapped in above visualization. We have a much more detailed prior post on the underlying paper Hustle and Flow: A Social Network Analysis of the American Federal Judiciary located here.  To see the full visualization contained within the paper, click on the slide above or click here.       

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Taking Judicial Content Seriously–Lupu & Fowler’s Strategic Content Model

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Roe v. Wade Citation Network

In my conversations with judicial politics scholars, many lament how many of our existing approaches tend to ignore opinion content.  For those interested in embedding opinion content into existing theories of judicial decision making … consider Yonatan Lupu & James Fowler’s paper recently posted to the SSRN.  

The authors present a strategic model of judicial bargaining over opinion content.  They note … “we find that the Court generates opinions that are better grounded in law when more justices write concurring opinions.”  To generate the specification for “grounding in law” the authors use Kleinberg’s Hubs and Authorities Algorithm calculated at the time the opinion was authored. The Strategic Content Paper is available here. 

The visual above is drawn from a related Fowler project located here.  Another very worthwhile paper authored by Fowler, Johnson, Spriggs, Jeon & Wahlbeck is located here.  

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Hustle & Flow: A Network Analysis of the American Federal Judiciary

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This paper written by CLS Blog Co-Founder Daniel Katz and Derek Stafford from the University of Michigan Department of Political Science representes an initial foray into Computational Legal Studies by the graduate students here at the University of Michigan Center for the Study of Complex Systems.  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 Circuit Court Justices.  Here is a wide shot of the broader network visualized using the Kamada-Kawai visualization algorithm:    

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Here is the abstract:      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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When is the first term enough?: On approximation in social science

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Research in the academic world suffers from the “hammer problem” – that is, the methods we use are often those that we have in our toolbox, not necessarily those that we should be using.  This is especially true in computational social science, where we often attempt to directly import well-developed methods from the hard sciences.

To prove the point, I’d like to highlight one example we’ve come across in our research.  In Leicht et al’s  Large-scale structure of time evolving citation networks, the authors apply two methods to a simplified representation of the United States Supreme Court citation network.  Both of these methods rely on complicated statistical algorithms and require iterative non-linear system solvers.  However, the results are consistent, and they detect “events” around 1900, 1940, and 1970.

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One  first-order alternative to detecting significant “events” in the Court would be to count citations.  One might suspect, for instance, that the formation or destruction of law might go hand-in-hand with an acceleration or deceleration in the rate of citation.  Such a method is purely conjectural, but costs much less to implement than the methods discussed above.

citationtimeseries

This figure shows the number of outgoing citations per year in blue, as well as the ten-year moving average in purple.  The plot shows jumps that coincide very well with the plot from Leicht, et. al.  Thus, although only a first-order approximation to the underlying dynamics, this method would lead historians down a similar path with much less effort.

This example, though simple, is one that really hits home for me.  After a week of struggling to align interpretations and methods, this plot convinced me more than any eigenvector or Lagrangian system.  Perhaps more importantly, unlike the above methods, you can explain this plot to a lay audience in a fifteen minute talk.