Justice blocks and predictability of U.S. Supreme Court votes

Successful attempts to predict judges' votes shed light into how legal decisions are made and, ultimately, into the behavior and evolution of the judiciary. Here, we investigate to what extent it is possible to make predictions of a justice's vote based on the other justices' votes in the same case. For our predictions, we use models and methods that have been developed to uncover hidden associations between actors in complex social networks. We show that these methods are more accurate at predicting justice's votes than forecasts made by legal experts and by algorithms that take into consideration the content of the cases. We argue that, within our framework, high predictability is a quantitative proxy for stable justice (and case) blocks, which probably reflect stable a priori attitudes toward the law. We find that U.S. Supreme Court justice votes are more predictable than one would expect from an ideal court composed of perfectly independent justices. Deviations from ideal behavior are most apparent in divided 5-4 decisions, where justice blocks seem to be most stable. Moreover, we find evidence that justice predictability decreased during the 50-year period spanning from the Warren Court to the Rehnquist Court, and that aggregate court predictability has been significantly lower during Democratic presidencies. More broadly, our results show that it is possible to use methods developed for the analysis of complex social networks to quantitatively investigate historical questions related to political decision-making.     

On Indian Justice

Abstract

In 1908 a Mescalero Apache who had killed a white man was tracked down and killed by an all-Mescalero posse. The crime of the fugitive and the behavior of his pursuers do not reflect some crossculturally inexplicable, specificaliy “Indian justice”, as various published comments have suggested. The Indian justice involved has to do with the precautions taken by the Indian leaders to discourage the development of an intra-community feud on the basis of the execution.     

Shaping Rules and Practice for More Justice. Local Conventions and Local Resistance in Eastern Senegal

Participatory programs and the transfer of the means of regulation to local populations can move local people to adopt government or development project agendas. They do not always succeed. When externally driven agendas fail to match local norms and practices, they are resisted and re-worked to accommodate local views, needs, and aspirations. In this interaction both the external agenda and local norms are contested and reconstituted in ways that follow the contours of the power asymmetries among local actors and external resource users, government agents and project managers. In the Tambacounda Region of Senegal, forest-dwelling villagers constantly negotiate forest use with more powerful urban-based merchants and transhumant herders. Government and international development programs have introduced ‘local conventions,’ written agreements among resource users, to reduce conflict over resource-use decisions. However, despite elaboration through participatory processes these conventions impose rules of management and use that contradict local environmental subjectivities; consequently, local people resist and rework introduced rules, and thus reconstitute them as, at least partly, their own.     

Justice for children: the child as organ donor

I argue that parents ought to be allowed to authorize their child's participation as an organ donor for another family member. I introduce a model of decisionmaking for children in intimate families which I call Constrained Parental Autonomy. This model permits wide parental discretion which is constrained absolutely by a broadly defined principle of respect for persons. In general, parental authorization alone is sufficient but I argue that the respect for persons constraint prevents certain donations and requires the child's assent for other donations. I also consider two controversial implications of the application of this model: the objection that the model does not respect the child's right to bodily integrity, and the objection that the model does not and is unable to address intrafamilial disgreement.     

Biomedical Enhancements as Justice

Biomedical enhancements, the applications of medical technology to make better those who are neither ill nor deficient, have made great strides in the past few decades. Using Amartya Sen's capability approach as my framework, I argue in this article that far from being simply permissible, we have a prima facie moral obligation to use these new developments for the end goal of promoting social justice. In terms of both range and magnitude, the use of biomedical enhancements will mark a radical advance in how we compensate the most disadvantaged members of society.