Law Commons^™

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

All Faculty Scholarship

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 …

Forecasting The Senate Vote On The Supreme Court Vacancy, Scott J. Basinger, Maxwell Mak

Publications and Research

This paper forecasts current senators’ votes on Merrick Garland’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, in the unlikely case that a vote actually takes place. The forecasts are necessarily conditional, awaiting measurement of the nominee’s characteristics. Nonetheless, a model that combines parameters estimated from existing data with values of some measurable characteristics of senators—particularly their party affiliations, party loyalty levels, and ideological positions—is sufficient to identify potential swing voters in the Senate. By accounting for a more nuanced and refined understanding of the confirmation process, our model reveals that if President Obama were to nominate almost any nominee (conservative or …

Looking Backward, Looking Forward: The Next 40 Years Of Environmental Law, Robert V. Percival

Faculty Scholarship

The only certainty concerning predictions for the future of the environment is that most of them are likely to be wrong. This is illustrated by the fate of past predictions, such as those contained in Paul Ehrlich's Populations Bomb, Gregg Easterbrook's A Moment on the Earth, and Bjørn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist. While it is difficult to guess at the future of the environment, predictions concerning environmental law are even more hazardous because they turn in large part on the future of politics. After reviewing current political gridlock over environmental concerns, this Article considers contemporary forecasts of the fate of …

The Mythology Of Game Theory, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner, Nick Weller

Faculty Scholarship

Non-cooperative game theory is at its heart a theory of cognition, specifically a theory of how decisions are made. Game theory's leverage is that we can design different payoffs, settings, player arrays, action possibilities, and information structures, and that these differences lead to different strategies, outcomes, and equilibria. It is well-known that, in experimental settings, people do not adopt the predicted strategies, outcomes, and equilibria. The standard response to this mismatch of prediction and observation is to add various psychological axioms to the game-theoretic framework. Regardless of the differing specific proposals and results, game theory uniformly makes certain cognitive assumptions …

The Pragmatist’S Guide To Comparative Effectiveness Research, Amitabh Chandra, Anupam B. Jena, Jonathan Skinner

Dartmouth Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Will Quants Rule The (Legal) World?, Edward K. Cheng

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Professor Ian Ayres, in his new book, Super Crunchers, details the brave new world of statistical prediction and how it has already begun to affect our lives. For years, academic researchers have known about the considerable and at times surprising advantages of statistical models over the considered judgments of experienced clinicians and experts. Today, these models are emerging all over the landscape. Whether the field is wine, baseball, medicine, or consumer relations, they are vying against traditional experts for control over how we make decisions. For the legal system, the take-home of Ayres's book and the examples he describes is …

Is American Health Care Uniquely Inefficient?, Alan M. Garber, Jonathan Skinner

Dartmouth Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Comment: Experts Who Don't Know They Don't Know, Jonathan Koehler

Faculty Working Papers

Sadly, the conclusion reached by Green and Armstrong (2006) – that experts should not be used for predicting the decisions that people will make in conflicts – comes as no surprise. Decades ago, Armstrong himself taught us that expertise beyond a minimal level does not improve judgmental accuracy across a variety of domains (Armstrong, 1980). More recently, Tetlock (2006) drove home the point in a study of hundreds of political experts who made thousands of forecasts over many years. Like Green and Armstrong (2006), Tetlock (2006) found that that expert forecasts were frequently inaccurate. In a nod to Armstrong's previous …

Transport Modeling – Technical And Legal Issues, Adrian Brown

Uncovering the Hidden Resource: Groundwater Law, Hydrology, and Policy in the 1990s (Summer Conference, June 15-17)

27 pages.

Contains footnotes.