A Stealth O'Connor or Souter After All?

[Danny_J_Boggs at ca6.uscourts.gov]

Everyone on this list can predict quite easily how every one of the 
current justices will "rule in particular types of cases"

With respect to the above quotation from Prof. Levinson, you may wish to 
examine the recent  "Supreme Court forecasting project" at Washington U 
Law School, where 3 "learned professors familiar with the field" (which 
included our esteemed moderator as one of the experts on the overall 
panel) -- and a computer program --  attempted to predict each Justice's 
vote on each case of the October 2002  term, before oral argument.

My recollection from following their website was that the overall success 
rate was only about 75% -- that the computer and the experts did roughly 
equally well -- and that there was not a single case where all three 
experts and the computer got every Justice correct. 

(After typing the above, I checked and found that some of this has been 
published at 104 Columbia Law Review 1150 -- They show the computer doing 
somewhat better, but their listing of "selected major cases" confirms that 
in none of those  cases did any one of the three human experts get the 
vote of each Justice correct). 

Apparently they did the exercise again for the 2003 term, but I did not 
follow the results that year.




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