Suchergebnisse

she mathematical problem of predicting Supreme Court decisions from a knowledge of the facts in the case can be perfectly--but trivially--solved, given that no explicit reversal occurs in the line of cases considered. However, perfect prediction does not guarantee that the method used to predict means anything or that factors given positive weight are considered by the Court. Analysis only of cases heard by the Court is unlikely to yield information about the relative importance of the really interesting factors. The method used by F. Kort (See SA 7149) is largely meaningless & fails simple empirical tests. There do exist, however, well-known statistical techniques for efficient analysis of this problem. Given the no-reversal condition, prediction will not be materially aided, since the observations necessary to construct a perfect predictor would be such as to ensure that all future cases were covered by clear precedents. Understanding of the behavior of the Court may well be enhanced by such analyses in the future, but, here & in general, quantitative analysis of pol'al phenomena undertaken without sufficient grounding in the use of quantitative methods is undesirable. AA-IPSA.