Social and Behavioral Sciences | Open Access Articles

A General Approach For Predicting The Behavior Of The Supreme Court Of The United States, Daniel Katz

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Building on developments in machine learning and prior work in the science of judicial prediction, we construct a model designed to predict the behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States in a generalized, out-of-sample context. To do so, we develop a time-evolving random forest classifier that leverages unique feature engineering to predict more than 240,000 justice votes and 28,000 cases outcomes over nearly two centuries (1816-2015). Using only data available prior to decision, our model outperforms null (baseline) models at both the justice and case level under both parametric and non-parametric tests. Over nearly two centuries, we achieve …

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Roundtable Discussion Transcript: The Legal And Ethical Limits Of Technological Warfare Symposium, February 1, 2013, University Of Utah, S.J. Quinney College Of Law, Amos N. Guiora, Harry Soyster, David R. Irvine, Geoffrey S. Corn, James Jay Carafano, Claire O. Finkelstein, Laurie R. Blank, Monica Hakimi, George R. Lucas, Trevor W. Morrison, Frederic Megret

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The Utah Law Review brought in a panel of experts for a symposium on the legal and ethical limits of technological warfare. This roundtable discussion crystalized the issues discussed throughout the symposium. The collective experience and diversity of viewpoints of the panelists produced an unparalleled discussion of the complex and poignant issues involved in drone warfare. The open dialogue in the roundtable discussion created moments of tension where the panelists openly challenged each other’s viewpoints on the ethics and legality of drone warfare. The discussion captured in this transcript uniquely conveys the diversity of perspectives and inherently challenging legal and …

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Still Adjusting To Markman: A Prescription For The Timing Of Claim Construction Hearings, William Lee, Anita Krug

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In Markman v. Westview Instruments, Inc., the Supreme Court held that the interpretation of patent claims is a question of law to be determined by the court rather than a question of fact to be decided by the jury. The Court based its holding on the belief that judges are better suited than juries to address claim interpretation issues and that claim interpretation by the court would result in greater uniformity in the treatment of patents. The Markman decision, however, has confronted the district courts with a host of thorny questions, such as what evidence they may consider in their …

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The Myth Of Context In Politics And Law, Anita Krug

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Visions of group-based rights in political and legal theory strive to be both antiessentialist and antiuniversalist. They reject an essentialist view of the self — a view that there is a single experience common to all persons composing, for example, a particular ethnic, racial, or gender group — on the basis that a person’s identity is context-based and contingent, and cannot be defined solely by such factors as race or gender. They also reject the universalist notion of an abstract equality of persons that is at the basis of traditional conceptions of individual rights. In short, group rights are based …

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

A General Approach For Predicting The Behavior Of The Supreme Court Of The United States, Daniel Katz

All Faculty Scholarship

All Faculty Scholarship

Still Adjusting To Markman: A Prescription For The Timing Of Claim Construction Hearings, William Lee, Anita Krug

All Faculty Scholarship

The Myth Of Context In Politics And Law, Anita Krug

All Faculty Scholarship