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Supreme Court Forecasting
overview
selected articles
Project Overview
This project involved a friendly interdisciplinary competition to compare the accuracy of the different ways in which legal experts and political scientists assess and predict Supreme Court decision making. Legal scholars and political scientists have engaged in much debate about why the Supreme Court decides cases as it does, but this ongoing discussion is almost always retrospective in nature — that is, scholars apply competing explanatory frameworks to existing Supreme Court decisions from the recent or not-so-recent past.
To invert the temporal link, during the Court's 2002 term, the investigators conducted a study where they predicted the outcome of each argued case. Two methods of prediction were used, and the study compared their relative accuracy. The PIs contrasted a statistical forecasting model (based on information derived from past Supreme Court decisions and certain characteristics of each pending case) with forecasts provided by legal experts (each of whom was an expert in some area of the Supreme Court's docket and many of whom clerked at the Court). The project website contains a description of the project, replication materials, and all of the forecasts from the 2002 term.  Supreme Court Forecasting - Detail Page |
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Washington University / School of Law / Campus Box 1120 / St. Louis MO 63130 cerl@law.wustl.edu |
