In this new series I look at Supreme Court opinions to provide a sense of the opinion’s writing quality and content. Although there is no consensus measure for writing quality, I have used StyleWriter 4 in past papers (e.g. Counting on Quality) and it does a good job of tailoring linguistic analyses to legal content…
Author: Dr. Adam Feldman
Ph.D. University of Southern California, Political Science
J.D., University of California, Berkeley (Boalt Hall)
Chief Justices’ Dissents (Vinson through Roberts)
(Image from New Yorker – 2007) A Twitter thread this morning started between Jeffrey Rosen and Kenneth Jost describes the number of dissenting opinions authored by Chief Justices – specifically comparing the number authored by Chief Justices Marshall and Taft (with relatively low number each) with Chief Justice Roberts (relatively higher comparatively). I thought it…
Comparing Amicus Briefs in Evenwel v. Abbott
A friend of mine practicing in a large firm recently asked me about comparing documents for similarity. While his interests are from a transactional standpoint, the same methods can be used to compare documents within or between cases. To continue with the amicus brief trope from the last post, I thought it would be interesting…
Amicus Briefs and Oral Arguments in the Roberts Court
Do the Justices and their clerks do their homework by reading and analyzing amicus briefs prior to oral arguments? In preparation for a larger project, I thought it would be interesting to probe this question (this also seems timely given Adam Liptak’s column in the New York Times on a recent study examining amicus briefs). …
Forecasting Votes in Hellerstedt
On March 2nd, the Court heard oral arguments in perhaps the most publicized case of the Term – Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (No. 15-274). The case brings into question Texas’ new controversial law limiting who can perform abortions. Prior to oral arguments expectations were already high that the Justices would split along ideological lines…
The Breyer Court? (Network Analysis of the Justices Votes in OT 2014)
In political science ideal points are the most common measure describing judges’ votes. The goal of ideal points in the study of courts is locating the relative political ideology of a judge on a scale of liberal to conservative. Of course what it actually means to be a conservative or liberal judge is somewhat contested….
Mining the Majority Opinion in Lockhart
Yesterday’s opinions in Lockhart showcased some unusual themes for the Court. Between the majority and dissenting opinions the Justices referenced the Kansas City Royals and the movies Star Wars and Zoolander. Atypical to say the least. Here is take a deeper look at the language of Lockhart’s majority opinion using a few text mining and analysis…
Empirical SCOTUS 