Articles on legal information or decision making in new issue of Journal of Empirical Legal Studies

The new issue of Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (10(2), June 2013) includes several articles on legal information or decision making:

• Doug Williams: Do Racial Preferences Affect Minority Learning in Law Schools?
• Andreas Glöckner and Christoph Engel: Can We Trust Intuitive Jurors? Standards of Proof and the Probative Value of Evidence in Coherence-Based Reasoning
• Christina L. Boyd, David A. Hoffman, Zoran Obradovic and Kosta Ristovski: Building a Taxonomy of Litigation: Clusters of Causes of Action in Federal Complaints
• Ryan C. Black and James F. Spriggs II: The Citation and Depreciation of U.S. Supreme Court Precedent
• William C. Thompson, Suzanne O. Kaasa and Tiamoyo Peterson: Do Jurors Give Appropriate Weight to Forensic Identification Evidence?

HT @aabibliographer

Zorn et al.: Organized Interests and Agenda Setting in the U.S. Supreme Court Revisited

Professor Dr. Christopher Zorn of Penn State University, and Professor Dr. Gregory Caldeira and Professor Dr. John (Jack) Wright, both of Ohio State University, presented a paper entitled Organized Interests and Agenda Setting in the U.S. Supreme Court Revisited, at CELS 2012: Conference on Empirical Legal Studies, held 9-10 November at Stanford Law School, Stanford, California, USA.

Here is the abstract:

We reevaluate the influence of amici curiae on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to grant certiorari. Using expanded data on four representative Court terms, we find that at the same time that the number of amicus filings on certiorari have grown — and perhaps owing to it — the influence of those briefs on the probability of the Court granting certiorari has steadily declined between 1968 and 2007. In addition, we find that the positive influence of briefs in opposition to certiorari noted in some earlier work appears to be an artifact of a particular Term. Among other things, these findings hold implications for the extent to which case selection effects might bias empirical scholarship on the Supreme Court.

Budziak & Lempert on Legal Argumentation and Case Quality at the U.S. Supreme Court

Jeffrey Budziak and Daniel Lempert, both of The Ohio State University Department of Political Science, have posted a working paper entitled Legal Argumentation and Case Quality at the U.S. Supreme Court, on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

The importance of legal argumentation at the Supreme Court has been subject to substantial debate in the judicial politics literature. Scholars have demonstrated that individual components of legal argumentation appear to independently influence Supreme Court decision-making. However, few examinations have attempted to disentangle, both theoretically and empirically, the dependent nature of legal argumentation. We attempt to do so by reexamining the oral argument component of legal argumentation. Relying on the oral argument grades assigned by Justice Harry Blackmun, we investigate the effect of oral argument grades at an unexpected stage of the Court’s process: the decision to grant certiorari (cert). Our results show that the grades assigned by Justice Blackmun strongly correlate with the decisions of individual justices to vote to grant cert. We believe the results demonstrate both the importance of the underdeveloped notion of “case quality” and the need for greater theoretical and conceptual clarity between the different components of legal argumentation.

HT @aabibliographer.

Bench-Capon & Prakken on Using Argument Schemes for Hypothetical Reasoning in Law

Professor Dr. Trevor Bench-Capon of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, and Professor Dr. Henry Prakken of the University of Groningen Faculty of Law have published Using Argument Schemes for Hypothetical Reasoning in Law, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law. Here is the abstract:

This paper studies the use of hypothetical and value-based reasoning in US Supreme-Court cases concerning the United States Fourth Amendment. Drawing upon formal AI & Law models of legal argument a semi-formal reconstruction is given of parts of the Carney case, which has been studied previously in AI & law research on case-based reasoning. As part of the reconstruction, a semi-formal proposal is made for extending the formal AI & Law models with forms of metalevel reasoning in several argument schemes. The result is compared with Rissland’s (1989) analysis in terms of dimensions and Ashley’s (2008) analysis in terms of his process model of legal argument with hypotheticals.

Ringhand & Collins on An Empirical Analysis of the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings of Supreme Court Nominees, 1939-2009

Professor Lori A. Ringhand of the University of Georgia School of Law and Professor Paul M. Collins, Jr. of the University of North Texas Department of Political Science have posted May it Please the Senate: An Empirical Analysis of the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings of Supreme Court Nominees, 1939-2009 (2010). Here is the abstract:

This paper examines the questions asked and answers given by every Supreme Court nominee who has appeared to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee since 1939. In doing so, it uses a new dataset developed by the authors. This database, which provides a much-needed empirical foundation for scholarship in emerging areas of constitutional law and political science, captures all of the statements made at the hearings and codes these comments by issue area, subissue area, party of the appointing president, and party of the questioning senator. The dataset allows us to quantify for the first time such things as which issues are most frequently discussed at the hearings, whether those issues have changed over time, and whether they vary depending on the party of the appointing president and the party of the questioning senator. We also investigate if questioning patterns differ depending on the race or gender of the nominee. Some of our results are unsurprising: for example, the hearings have become longer. Others, however, challenge conventional wisdom: the Bork hearing is less of an outlier in several ways than is frequently assumed, and abortion has not dominated the hearings. We also discover that there is issue area variation over time, and that there are notable disparities in the issues addressed by Democratic versus Republican senators. Finally, we find that female and minority nominees face a significantly different hearing environment than do white male nominees.

Click here for an infographic — created by GOOD and MGMT. design — based on some of the data in this paper.

HT @cmccool.

Schuman on The Ticking Time Bomb in the Supreme Court’s Doe v. Reed Opinion

Daniel Schuman of Sunlight Foundation has written a very interesting post on yesterday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Doe v. Reed case: The Ticking Time Bomb in the Supreme Court’s Doe v. Reed Opinion.

This case is of interest to the legal informatics and legal communication communities, because the case concerns the disclosure of information about citizens in their capacity as lawmakers in referendum or initiative processes.

Doe v. Reed: On the Disclosure of Referendum Petitions

Public disclosure of “referendum petitions in general,” which disclosure occurs pursuant to Washington State’s Public Records Act (PRA), does not violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Supreme Court held today, in the case of Doe v. Reed, No. 09-559.

In reaching its decision, the Court applied an intermediate, “exacting scrutiny” standard of review.

The Court did not decide whether disclosure, pursuant to the PRA, of the referendum petition respecting Washington’s Senate Bill 5688, which “‘expand[ed] the rights and responsibilities’ of state-registered domestic partners, including same-sex domestic partners,” would violate the First Amendment. The Court remanded the case to lower federal courts to decide that issue. The Court stated that its ruling on this broad challenge — respecting “referendum petitions in general” — “does not foreclose a litigant’s success in a narrower one.”

However, five Justices wrote or joined concurring opinions questioning or contesting the view that in a challenge involving a particular referendum the First Amendment would bar disclosure of the referendum petition, even respecting a highly controversial referendum.

This case is of interest to the legal informatics and legal communication communities, because the case concerns the disclosure of information about citizens in their capacity as lawmakers in referendum or initiative processes.

Legal communication scholars may find particularly interesting Justice Scalia’s concurring opinion, which contains an extended historical discussion of anonymity in voting in the U.S.

Slides Available for Bommarito et al., Distance Measures for Dynamic Citation Networks @ Political Networks Conference 2010

Michael James Bommarito II, Daniel Martin Katz, & Jon Zelner, all of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Center for Study of Complex Systems, & Professor James H. Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, Department of Political Science, presented their paper entitled Distance Measures for Dynamic Citation Networks at the Political Networks Conference 2010, held 19-21 May 2010 at the Duke University Department of Political Science, in Durham, North Carolina, USA.

Click here for the presentation slides at Computational Legal Studies.

Here is the abstract of the paper:

Acyclic digraphs arise in many natural and artificial processes. Among the broader set, dynamic citation networks represent a substantively important form of acyclic digraphs. For example, the study of such networks includes the spread of ideas through academic citations, the spread of innovation through patent citations, and the development of precedent in common law systems. The specific dynamics that produce such acyclic digraphs not only differentiate them from other classes of graphs, but also provide guidance for the development of meaningful distance measures. In this article, we develop and apply our sink distance measure together with the single-linkage hierarchical clustering algorithm to both a two-dimensional directed preferential attachment model as well as empirical data drawn from the first quarter century of decisions of the United States Supreme Court. Despite applying the simplest combination of distance measures and clustering algorithms, analysis reveals that more accurate and more interpretable clusterings are produced by this scheme.

SCOTUS Decisions 1937-1975 Now Available in Bulk from GPO

Full text of U.S. Supreme Court decisions issued from 1937-1975 — derived from the U.S. Air Force’s FLITE database — is available in bulk from the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO)’s FDsys, as of 13 April 2010.

UPDATE: According to GPO, this FLITE file is a text-only file, of approximately 50MB, containing U.S. Supreme Court decisions from 1937 through 1975. The data is not marked up in XML, and there is no user guide accompanying the data. GPO says it does not currently have plans to mark up this data in XML or to chunk the data into smaller components. GPO says it would be interested in partnering with another organization respecting marking up this data in XML and dividing the data into smaller components. Interested organizations should contact GPO’s Office of the Chief Information Officer. [This paragraph added 22 April 2010.]

This information may be of particular interest to those developing legal information systems, and those following the Law.gov legal open government data project.

Blake & Hacker on Supreme Court Justices Reading Dissents from the Bench

William D. Blake of the University of Texas Department of Government and Professor Hans J. Hacker of the Arkansas State University Department of Political Science have posted “The Brooding Spirit of the Law”: Supreme Court Justices Reading Dissents from the Bench, 31 Justice System Journal 1 (2010) (Issue no. 1). Here is the abstract:

In rare instances, a Supreme Court justice may elect to call attention to his or her displeasure with a majority decision by reading a dissenting opinion from the bench. We document this phenomenon by constructing a data set from audio files of Court proceedings and news accounts. We then test a model explaining why justices use this practice selectively by analyzing ideological, strategic, and institutional variables. Judicial review, formal alteration of precedent, size of majority coalition, and issue area influence this behavior. Ideological distance between the dissenter and majority opinion writer produces a counterintuitive relationship. We suspect that reading a dissent is an action selectively undertaken when bargaining and accommodation among ideologically proximate justices has broken down irreparably.