I just finished Of Love and Other Demons, a short book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez that I bought a very long time ago, because I was so intrigued by the title. It's five chapters long, and the first four chapters are perfectly good in that Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez-tells-a-good-story kind of way. The fifth chapter, though, blows the previous four away in a way that makes the whole book highly worth reading.

This quote from the book is dedicated to those friends of mine and Crescat's who are a handful of time zones ahead:

"The very idea that they have already slept tonight in Spain fills me with terror."

"We cannot intervene in the rotation of the earth," said Delaura.

"But we could be unaware of it so that it does not cause us grief," said the Bishop. "More than faith, what Galileo lacked was a heart."

Greg's post below reminded me that I never got around to posting on the Supreme Court Forecasting Project, despite seeing one of the coauthors present a draft of the paper this fall. Ooops. At any rate, I can at least take this moment to draw attention to one of the more amusing factoids in the data: not only did the experts (in the aggregate) do worse than the algorithm, the experts did worse than they would have if they had simply bet "The Court will reverse" on every single case. In the 2002 term, the experts got 59.1% percent correct, while the reversal rate (and hence the percent correctly predicted by using the naive "bet on reversal" rule) was 72%.

Now, this isn't a particularly nice comparison to make, or a particularly fair one. The 2002 term had a rather high reversal rate; the average over the past 10 terms was 63%. Then again, 63% is still higher than the experts' 59.1%. Of course, it's possible that this was just a bad year for the experts; we won't know until this contest is repeated a few more times.

Nevertheless, this highlights two important issues: first, even experts often overestimate their own private knowledge. Second, especially when dealing with discrete choice models, it's important to be careful about what makes a model good or bad. "The Court always reverses" is right a decent percentage of the time; this particular term, it was right almost as often as was a much more complex model made by professionals. But it's clearly a bad model with respect to knowing what American law is or what it will be in a given case; all it highlights, really, is the fact that an unreversed decision stands, so a Supreme Court that is inclined to affirm has less need to grant cert. than one which plans to reverse. It's worth reading the article Greg linked to, then, if only for the discussion near the end where the authors highlight what such models are and are not good for.

The Supreme Court Forecasting Project was designed to facilitate a "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."

Professor Volokh offered an early prediction on which group might be victorious:

Cool! I've been on the side of the steam drills in many projects; they win eventually. But somehow I think that you can bet yo' las' red cent on me and my colleagues in at least this particular competition.

Well, I hope Professor Volokh did not bet his las' red cent on the predictions offered by him and the rest of his colleagues. According to results from the Court's 2002 term just published in the Columbia Law Review, the statistical model created by political scientists correctly predicted 75% of the Court's affirm/reverse results correctly, while the legal experts languished behind at 59.1% of case outcomes correctly predicted.

I haven't yet been able to look over the paper closely, but this appears to be a significant victory for political scientists in the long running debate over which group is more accurately able to predict Supreme Court outcomes. If you're wondering, the model created by political scientists considered six factors: "(1) circuit of origin; (2) issue area of the case; (3) type of petitioner (e.g., the United States, an employer, etc.); (4) type of respondent; (5) ideological direction (liberal or conservative) of the lower court ruling; and (6) whether the petitioner argued that a law or practice is unconstitutional." Id. at 1154 n. 19. As the paper reports, "The legal experts, by contrast, utilized particularized knowledge, such as the specific facts of the case or statements by individual Justices in similar cases." Id. at 1154.

Thanks to How Appealing for pointing to the published results.

I'm sorry to hear about Belle Waring's travel travails, and I just thought I'd point out that it's my visceral reaction to this sort of thing that makes me something of a libertarian.

I just can't understand the purpose of a set of rules that stops an adult woman and her husband and child who go to the embassy and explain, "Hi, we're law-abiding citizens who would like to go on vacation." The fear is-- what, precisely? Couldn't somebody just fingerprint them before they leave and check when they return?

Sigh. I realize that the let-Belle-Waring-go-on-vacation cause doesn't carry the moral imperative that a lot of Libertarian causes do, but it still irritates me.

UPDATE: A note to the emailers-- I'm fully aware of the need to have sensible systems, and aware that a sensible system can't make exceptions for every case of need. Yes, rule of law, is good.

BUT, my claim is that the current system of immigration/travel law nearly anywhere is far from sensible. Why not let babies travel on their mothers' passports? (Perhaps subject to some sort of extra check-- finger prints or . . . whatever).

This will be of interest to nobody but me and the other two Ada-lovers on the web, but the curious Nabokov site Zembla is launching a project called ADAOnline, which will put the entire text of Ada, complete with Brian Boyd's sometimes too-complete notes from the Nabokovian, online.

Ada, is, of course, Nabokov's greatest novel, and coincidentally the greatest novel written in the English language. [Contra William Jefferson Clinton.]

Oh, and the folks there are also looking for volunteers to help encode the rest of the novel. Anybody with lots of time handy who is looking to be acknowledged on the site should email Jeff Edmunds: jhe2 at psulias dot psu dot edu.

UPDATE: Paul Johnson emails me to point out that 100 Years of Solitude, WJC's favorite novel, was not in fact written in English.

As all serious court-addicts will have deduced by now, there are some new Supreme Court opinions out (available, among other places, here, and briefly summarized, among other places, here). Thus far, the snappy-line-of-the-day award goes to Justice Scalia (writing a majority opinion for Thomas, Ginsburg, Stevens, Souter, and himself) in Blakeley v. Washington:

JUSTICE BREYER cites JUSTICE O'CONNOR's Apprendi dissent for the point that this Bishop quotation means only that indictments must charge facts that trigger statutory aggravation of a common-law offense. Of course, as he notes, JUSTICE O'CONNOR was referring to an entirely different quotation, from Archbold's treatise. JUSTICE BREYER claims the two are similar, post, at 14, but they are as similar as chalk and cheese.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR does not even provide a coherent alternative meaning for the jury-trial guarantee, unless one considers "whatever the legislature chooses to leave to the jury, so long as it does not go too far" coherent.

SCOTUSBlog reports a partial win for Cheney in the Supreme Court, with what seem to be five votes-- Kennedy in the majority and Ginsburg in one of the dissents (reading from the bench, which usually means that a justice got particularly exercised about the issue). If so, and if Scalia is one of the five, it means that the prediction Bruce Ackerman made in class last March is wrong.
UPDATE (10:27 EST): The AP calls the decision 7-2.

UPDATE TWO (10:58 EST): Bruce Ackerman is vindicated, according to the AP. Scalia and Thomas form a 2-Justice concurrence, thus Scalia's not to recuse himeslf doesn't matter at all.

The Curmudgeonly Clerk suggests that the legitimacy of the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore should not be impugned, since even had Gore won, the evidence seemed to be that he would have lost the recount:

I can find no evidence that any organization has ever found that Gore would have won had the recount continued as per his own preferred methodology. It seems somewhat questionable to brand the Court's conduct illegitimate, given the inevitability of the outcome, particularly when that inevitability was the result of Gore's own litigation strategy.