This paper analyzes the extent to which the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court cast votes that support the positions of the president, or more generally the Executive Branch. Can presidents count on such deference from those justices they nominate or those whom are nominated by other presidents of the same party? Or, do the justices demonstrate judicial independence and impartiality such that t...

Let L be a lattice and let L1, L2 be sublattices of L. Let be a congruence relation of L1. We extend to L by taking the smallest congruence of L containing . Then we restrict to L2, obtaining the congruence L2 of L2. Thus we have de ned a map ConL1 ! ConL2. Obviously, this is an isotone 0-preservingmap of the nite distributive lattice ConL1 into the nite distributive lattice ConL2. The main res...

A major goal of the Cognitive Infocommunication approach is to develop applications in which human and artificial cognitive systems are made to work more effectively. A critical step in this process is improving our understanding of human–human interaction so that it may be modeled more closely. Our work addresses this task by examining the role of entrainment – the propensity of conversational...

Epstein and Knight’s The Choices Justices make builds upon and empirically assesses Walter F. Murphy’s argument in Elements of Judicial Strategy (1964) that Supreme Court justices act strategically. “On our account,” Epstein and Knight write, “which we call a strategic account, justices may be primarily seekers of legal policy, but they are not unsophisticated characters who make choices based ...

A major goal of the Cognitive Infocommunication approach is to develop applications in which human and artificial cognitive systems are made to work more effectively. A critical step in this process is improving our understanding of human-human interaction so that it may be modeled more closely. Our work addresses this task by examining the role of entrainment-the propensity of conversational p...

This Essay begins by identiying the various kinds of partiality the Justices of the Supreme Court can have in the cases they decide. Although there is widespread recognition of the influence these biases might have, for the most part the Justices continue to write opinions as if they (and other judges) were entirely disinterested. This practice is often thought to be justified as a source ofjud...

Countable Lawvere theories model computational effects such as exceptions, side-effects, interactive input/output, nondeterminism and probabilistic nondeterminism. The category of countable Lawvere theories has sums, tensors, and distributive tensors, modelling natural combinations of such effects. It is also closed under taking images. Enrichment in a category such as Cpo allows one to extend ...

In Supreme Court parlance and the political science literature, an ideal point positions a justice in a continuous space and can be interpreted as a quantification of the justice’s policy preferences. We present an automated approach to infer such ideal points for justices of the US Supreme Court. This approach combines topic modeling over case opinions with the voting (and endorsing) behavior ...

At the heart of attitudinal and strategic explanations of judicial behavior is the assumption that justices have policy preferences. These preferences have been measured in a handful of ways, including using factor analysis and multidimensional scaling techniques (Schubert, 1965, 1974), looking at past votes in a single policy area (Epstein et al., 1989), content-analyzing newspaper editorials ...

Recent research has demonstrated that the preferences of US Supreme Court justices are not simply unidimensional. We demonstrate a new approach to Bayesian preference estimation that estimates case-specific preferences for justices, using a conditional autoregressive model with citation counts determining the correlation between justices’ preferences across cases. By using citations between cas...