Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

How Not To Lie With Judicial Votes: Misconceptions, Measurement, And Models, Daniel E. Ho, Kevin M. Quinn

Faculty Articles

In Part I, we describe the formal spatial theory often invoked to justify the statistical approach. While spatial theory has the nice feature of synthesizing theory and empirics, legal scholars may remain skeptical of its strong assumptions. Fortunately, measurement models can be illuminating even if the spatial theory is questionable.

To illustrate this, Part II provides a nontechnical overview of the intuition behind measurement models that take merits votes as an input and return a summary score of Justice-specific behavior as an output. Such scores provide clear and intuitive descriptive summaries of differences in judicial voting.

Confusion abounds, however, and …

Did A Switch In Time Save Nine?, Daniel E. Ho, Kevin M. Quinn

Faculty Articles

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s court-packing plan of 1937 and the “switch in time that saved nine” animate central questions of law, politics, and history. Did Supreme Court Justice Roberts abruptly switch votes in 1937 to avert a showdown with Roosevelt? Scholars disagree vigorously about whether Roberts’s transformation was gradual and anticipated or abrupt and unexpected. Using newly collected data of votes from the 1931–1940 terms, we contribute to the historical understanding of this episode by providing the first quantitative evidence of Roberts’s transformation. Applying modern measurement methods, we show that Roberts shifted sharply to the left in the 1936 term. The …

Slums, Slumdogs, And Resistance, Tayyab Mahmud

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

The Google Book Settlement And The Fair Use Counterfactual, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

The sprawling Google Book Search litigation began as a dispute between the search engine colossus and a variety of authors and publishers over the legality of Google’s book digitization effort, the Google Book Search project (“GBS” or “Google Book Search”), for the purpose of indexing paper collections and making them searchable on the Internet. However, through the metamorphic power of class action litigation, a dispute over mere indexing and searching has been transformed into a comprehensive agreement over the future of the book as a digital commodity. Understanding this transformation and its implications is the central ambition of this article. …