FantasySCOTUS.net Went 2/2 Today

We correctly predicted the outcomes of Genesis HealthCare Corp. v. Symczyk and U.S. Airways v. McCutchen.

So far this term, we have correctly predicted 72.7% of the 33 cases decided so far. The bulk of cases are remaining to stay tuned.

FantasySCOTUS Went 6-3 This Week, Overall 68% Accuracy for the Term

This week, the Supreme Court dropped nine opinions on us. FantasySCOTUS correctly predicted Chaidez v. US, Gunn v. Minton, Henderson v. U.S., Johnson v. Williams, Florida v. Harris, and FTC. Phoebe Putney Health System. Two of the cases we missed were awfully close. Evans v. Michigan was 47.4/52.63 and Chafin v. Chafin was 51.3/48.7. Bailey v. U.S. was 58.4/41.6, a wider margin, but still was too close to call.

Overall, this term, FantasySCOTUS has predicted 68.4% of the cases correctly. That is about our historical average.

You can view all predictions at the FantasySCOTUS Prediction Tracker.

Kagan’s FantasySCOTUS: “I would like to have a Court where there’s more unpredictability of decision-making.”

Justice Kagan took a very apolitical view of her Court, and sought to have the Justices vote more unpredictably.

“There is not a single member of this Court, at a single time, who has made a decision, who has cast a vote, based on do I like this president, do I not like this president … will this help the Democrats, will this help the Republicans?” she said. “It is just not the way any member of the Court thinks.”

Still, she said, “There are certain substantive matters that we divide on because we approach Constitutional decision-making in a different sort of way, because we bring different methodologies to the table, because we have different views about governing precedents and how broad or narrow those precedents are.” The Court, she added, would be better off “if we had fewer of these 5-4 cases. … I would like to have a Court where there’s more unpredictability of decision-making.”

Unpredictable votes? That would be a fantasy Supreme Court.

Kagan also had interesting remarks about cameras in the Court, the power of law clerks, and her duty on the cafeteria committee:

• aid she used to support allowing cameras into Supreme Court oral arguments, but now wonders whether that would make the institution work “less well,” in part because of her concern that a clip would end up, out of context, on the evening news
• Said that questioning by the justices during oral arguments has grown more detailed and intense in recent years, starting with Scalia, whose view was: “We’ve all read the brief.… Let’s try to make this hour of our day useful”
• Disputed a belief that clerks have too much power and influence on the Court’s decisions. “The notion that these 28-year-olds are deciding cases? They’re not.” Clerks are very helpful, though, at deciding which cases the Court should take
• Pointed out that she, as the junior justice, has to open the door when justices are in conference and a staff member for a fellow justice drops off, say, a cup of coffee or the justice’s glasses; take notes; and serve on the Supreme Court cafeteria committee (where she made the popular decision of having a frozen yogurt machine brought in).

H/T How Appealing

FantasySCOTUS.net Chief Justice Berlove is Not A “Liar.” Oracle, Maybe.

In John Elwood and Eric White’s “Supreme Court in Revue” feature in the Greenbag, the authors write that:

There is a word for people who accurately predicted the Court would uphold the Affordable Care Act’s “Individual Mandate” by a 5- 4 vote with the Chief Justice providing the decisive vote and Justice Kennedy in dissent: liars.

Alas, Jacob Berlove, the perennial Chief Justice of FantasySCOTUS made just that prediction, and nailed NFIB v. Sebelius. Jacob sent a note: “The final vote on the individual mandate was fairly foreseeable in light of Robert’s inaction in Comstock.”

He wasn’t the only one. 9 others (out of 430!) made that prediction. So the numbers were small, but Jacob is certainly not a liar. Cf. Jakob the Liar.

FantsaySCOTUS Featured in Kaiser Health News

With some great quotations by Corey!

On the FantasySCOTUS Web site, 54 percent of an audience composed largely of law students and clerks predicted the mandate will be thrown out. . . .

At FantasySCOTUS no money changes hands. Winners get “bragging rights,” said Corey Carpenter, director of analysis for the Harlan Institute, an educational nonprofit affiliated with the site. Predictions on FantasySCOTUS of the mandate’s demise saw little increase following the arguments, perhaps because the site’s audience pays more attention to legal logic than media coverage, Carpenter said.

The Supreme Court Project

A law firm in Philadelphia is launching a “Supreme Court Project” that “attempts to build on and extend empirical work explaining the United States Supreme Court’s decision making and its review of the thirteen United States Courts of Appeals.” Ultimately they want to predict cases.

But, their methodology is so severely lacking.

Phase II.  While our Phase I work identified variations in circuit court reversal rates, it did not attempt to explain the reasons for variations.  In Phase II we will apply econometric techniques to test various hypotheses that explain these variations.

One hypothesis, for example, is that the political party (or appointing President) of a Justice and the members of the Circuit Court panel may, in part, explain the Justice’s decision to affirm or reverse; a Justice and a judge appointed by the same President or a President from the same party may, all else equal, lead to a lower probability of reversal.  Other hypotheses include:  whether a Justice is less likely to reverse (1) a Court of Appeals over which s/he is the Circuit Justice; (2) a Judge who attended the same law school as the Justice, or (3) a Judge who is the same gender as the Justice.

Clearly, a few caveats are in order.  First, a statistical correlation is only just that and needs to be supplemented by an underlying rationale; a statistical finding that left handed Justices reverse left handed Court of Appeals Judges more often than right handed ones, for example, would likely be spurious.  Nevertheless, data driven inquiries such as these (and others) are important in revealing patterns that actually occur.  We welcome interested readers to e-mail us with suggestions of plausible theories that could be tested with available data.

Second, the tests of these hypotheses should be part of a broader statistical model of Supreme Court Justice decision making.  In that way, we anticipate that this work will build on the pioneering work of, among others, the Washington University Supreme Court Forecasting Project, which applied statistical techniques to predict Supreme Court Justice voting behavior and Court decisions. We hope to extend that work by, among other things, updating their results for the Roberts Court and employing additional explanatory variables (including those relating to the Courts of Appeals.)

Looking at what school the Justice went to? Really?

Also, scoring cases as affirm or reverse is tough. I know that. I have no idea what they mean by the “shadow.”

 For each of these cases, the Supreme Court ruled on a legal issue addressed not just in the case on appeal, but also one or more “shadow decisions” (i.e., court of appeals decisions that have ruled on a legal issue that comprises the circuit split).  Any measure of reversals and affirmances that does not account for these shadow decisions is therefore incomplete and potentially misleading.

We, therefore, have established a “full” measure of the circuit courts’ reversal and affirmance rates, taking into account both decisions on direct appeal and these shadow decisions.  This measure, we believe, provides a more robust and more accurate view of the relationship between the United States Courts of Appeals and the United States Supreme Court.

I’ll keep my eye on this. At least law firms are considering these issues.

“It is a truism of the American justice system that the Supreme Court operates in secret, unmoved by candlelight vigils and protests, polls and placard-wielding crowds.”

Dahlia Lithwick and Lisa McElroy on the Supreme Court’s silence leading up to the execution of Troy Davis:

ON Wednesday night, Troy Davis was executed for a crime he may or may not have committed. But the real crime on Wednesday night was the action — or really the lack of action, the absolute radio silence — of the United States Supreme Court, which, as the nation watched and waited, did nothing for 203 minutes past the scheduled execution time. Or at least nothing anyone could see.

It is a truism of the American justice system that the Supreme Court operates in secret, unmoved by candlelight vigils and protests, polls and placard-wielding crowds. That is right and proper. It’s the reason the justices are unelected and also the reason they are required to write fully developed opinions and orders.

But we must keep in mind that the court knew for several days that the execution was scheduled for Wednesday at 7 p.m. It knew that it would receive a last-minute petition for a stay and that Georgia would not carry out the execution until it spoke. Under those circumstances, for it to consider a matter of life and death, while for over three long hours America and the world are told absolutely nothing, is a violation of that basic bargain. It is a show of power without reason and of authority without accountability.

FantasySCOTUS should get in on this!

For 3 hours and 23 minutes the foremost lawyers and pundits in the country tried to guess at what was going on in Washington, while the Supreme Court’s Web site offered no information about the matter. If any other branch of government had exercised such power without explanation, it would have looked like all of democracy had been put on hold.

I think Dahlia is being a bit too melodramatic. The instant petition was filed under the All Writs Act, which basically gives the Court some vague, nebulous discretion. The Court has spent so much time in the past on this case, with a full written opinion. This was the last ditch effort that never works. What did Dahlia want? If the order was granted quickly, I imagine she would call the Court callous for not giving it due consideration. Too long (3 hours it seems) means the Court made Davis wait unnecessary long. What would the Goldilocks order have been like? After 90 minutes with pages of hand-wringing over the execution, and how they want to stop it, but can’t under the law? There were no dissents or anything! If any justice wanted to dissent, he or she could have held up the order. I just don’t know what she wanted.

JoshCast: Interview with Jacob Berlove, Chief Justice of FantasySCOTUS OT 2010

Congratulations to Jacob Berlove–whose username Melech appropriately means “The King”–the Chief Justice of FantasySCOUTS for the October 2010 Term. Jacob predicted approximately 80% of the cases correctly, and beat his next-closest competitor by over 200 points. Jacob also beat Tom Goldstein’s predictions, and scored higher than Columbia Law School, the highest-ranked team in the FantasySCOTUS Law School Challenge.

Jacob never went to law school, and taught himself constitutional law in High School by reading a Constitutional Law textbook cover-to-cover. In this JoshCast, I ask Jacob about how he makes his predictions, which cases were hardest to predict, and which cases were easiest to predict. Good job Jacob! Your golden gavel is in the mail. Definitely worth a listen! Check out the full leader-board here.

Download the JoshCast here.

Update: Some photos of the Chief with the Golden Gavel!

Congratulations to the Chief Justice and Associate Justices of FantasySCOTUS OT 2010

The results are in for FantasySCOTUS October 2010 Term. Congratulations to Melech, also known as Jacob Berlove, who is the Chief Justice of FantasySCOTUS. I have a JoshCast with Jacob, where I talk about how he makes his predictions, and his legal background–he never went to law school. Amazing! The Chief Justice, Senior Associate Justice, and the Associate Justices, scored a remarkably high accurate rate–approaching 80%. Well done!

		Member	Points
1		Melech – Chief Justice	6,540
2		nbcrcc - Senior Associate Justice	6,330
3		tcampbell1950 – Associate justice	6,310
4		lawnerd – Associate Justice	6,100
5		Jakes553 – Associate Justice	5,910
6		corteal – Associate Justice	5,890
7		abbamouse – Associate Justice	5,870
8		TheConstitutionsChamp – Associate Justice	5,400
9		vivekn – Associate Justice	5,340

FantasySCOTUS Scoreboard 6/9/11

Here are the latest rankings:

		Member	Points
1		Melech	4,340
2		tcampbell1950	4,190
3		nbcrcc	4,190
4		lawnerd	4,100
5		Jakes553	3,870
6		abbamouse	3,790
7		corteal	3,790
8		vivekn	3,620
9		TheConstitutionsChamp	3,580
10		homerthedude	3,520
11		Kanu17	3,270
12		ugapolisci	3,260
13		eodenius	3,220
14		jonathaningram	3,200
15		hummel8226	3,070
16		ctrejbal	2,970
17		hythlos	2,850
18		jtrulock	2,840
19		Alexander	2,760
20		keichstaedt	2,670
21		gomorra3	2,590
22		andrewthemachine	2,480
23		nuchar	2,250
24		shanec	2,240
25		uscterrapin	2,130

Here are the latest law school rankings:

Supreme Court Information Markets, Timing the Stock Market, and Ted Frank Putting his Money where Mouth Is

Ted Frank, the macha of the Center for Class Action Fairness, knows how to put his money where his mouth is. Ted is so confident that the Supreme Court will reverse the 9th Circuit in Wal-Mart v. Dukes that he made a leveraged bet–of 10% of his net assets–that WMT (Wal-Mart’s symbol) will bounce.

I’m very confident that Wal-Mart v. Dukes will result in a reversal of the class certification in the enormous multi-billion dollar class action against it. But the things that make me confident in that result—the briefs, the tenor of the oral argument, the language in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion about the importance of protecting the rights of unnamed class members—did not produce movement in the market price of Wal-Mart stock. This leads me to suspect that the market is undervaluing the probability of reversal, and will be surprised when the Supreme Court does reverse later this month.

It’s always bothered me when economists make clever predictions but aren’t willing to bet on them, Julian Simon a notable exception. Here’s a hypothesis that won’t take twenty years to resolve; if I’m right, aren’t I stupid if I don’t make a quick profit on this predicted market inefficiency. So I’ve put my money where my mouth is: with the dip in stock prices last week, I invested a bit over 10% of my net worth in a leveraged bet that WMT stock will bounce this month when the Supreme Court releases its decision through purchases of July and September out-of-the-money call contracts.

Kudos to Ted for taking this risk based on his sense of how the Court will act. He bases his decision on “the briefs, the tenor of the oral argument, the language in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion about the importance of protecting the rights of unnamed class members.”

While I commend Ted, his individual gut instinct is less than perfect. Like Yogi Berra said, people are very bad about making predictions; especially about the future. A Prediction Market, with a proven track record, that taps into the wisdom of the crowds would be a more sound basis to make such a big investment. Fortunately for Ted, such a market exists–FantasySCOTUS.net, and currently 76% of members predict a reversal.

Larry Ribstein has more along the same line, with respect to information service products.

I agree with Ted about the risks, particularly including the risk the market’s already priced this given Wal-Mart’s huge float and analyst following, and about the costs of making the bet.  On the other hand, Ted’s post illustrates the costs of arbitrage, and therefore why markets could be wrong. It also illustrates how making betting against the market cheaper would increase market efficiency (and, as Ted notes,counteract a trial lawyer strategy).

But my main point here concerns my views about a potentially expanded role for legal information experts in capital markets. Here’s an excerpt from Kobayashi & my Law’s Information Revolution (footnotes omitted):

Law-related matters generate many types of information which can have significant market value because of the potentially high stakes of legal outcomes. In particular, litigation significantly affects asset values.  All firms have some litigation risk, and some firms have a lot riding on actual or potential tort or intellectual property litigation.  * * * This suggests a market demand for legal analysis in connection with firm valuation.

I look forward to Ted’s newly-found fortune, and his gumption for relying on the Supreme Court to bolster his net worth.

FantasySCOTUS.net Predictions for 6/6/2011

From the FantasySCOTUS Prediction Tracker, here are predictions for all cases argued, but not yet decided, from the October 2010 Supreme Court Term.

Harlan Institute and FantasySCOTUS Featured on New York Times’ Learning Network

The Time’s Learning Network ran a feature as a follow-up to last week’s front page article about social media in the classroom. The Times interviewed Erin Olson, a member of the Harlan Institute Teacher Advisory Network. When asked about social media and civic engagement, she discussed her class’s experience with FantasySCOTUS and Snyder v. Phelps.

Q. Does classroom engagement in social media lead to civic engagement? Is social media use related in any way to increased activism?
A.  E.O.: I am not the dispenser of all knowledge. Through social media, students can learn from the source, and the expert is not necessarily me. I can connect our class to experts in the field of study whether that be a professor, an author, a lawyer or a historian. There is so much information on the Web; students must read critically. In a time when e-mail forwards are considered truth, the ability to research effectively, to discover bias, and to analyze sources becomes crucial.

My juniors are members of the Harlan Institute Supreme Court Fantasy League. Students read about the Snyder v. Phelps case, and on Veterans Day, the class discussed the case with a lawyer via Skype. Students responded to prompts on our Harlan blog. The class was inspired by the reading, and volunteered to perform a reader’s theater piece for the Veterans Day program. As we continued reading, writing, speaking, analyzing and researching, students managed to continue discussing the case. They understood the need to protect the freedom of speech, but they were troubled by the hurtful comments made during a time of mourning

A few weeks ago, my students entered the room one talking over the other. Westboro Baptist Church was protesting a funeral of a fallen soldier; the funeral was in Iowa. Students organized a peaceful demonstration of support for soldiers. Their passion was inspiring, and their genuine empathy and support for soldiers fighting, for families of soldiers, for those fallen … amazing.

Erin talks more about the experience with the Westboro Baptists here.

Congrats Erin!

JoshCast: Congratulations to Justin Donoho, the Chief Justice of FantasySCOTUS OT2009

Congratulations to Justin Donoho, the Chief Justice of the inaugural season of FantasySCOTUS. Justin had the highest score, and beat out nearly 5,000 other members, including former Supreme Court clerks, appellate litigators, and numerous professors to obtain this coveted title. Justin’s golden gavel trophy is in the mail.

Justin recently finished a clerkship with the Honorable William J. Bauer on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Before clerking, he attended law school at the University of Chicago, where he served as a research assistant for Judge Richard A. Posner. Now Justin is an associate at Grippo & Elden in Chicago.

Recently, I recorded a JoshCast with Justin. I was most curious how he worked his magic. His answer? He started with the presumption that the Court would vote 9-0 reverse and worked from there. In many cases, involving controversial topics, he would look how Justices voted in like issues. In other cases, he “just went with his gut.” Interestingly, his predictions generally didn’t change following oral arguments, though he still read the transcripts closely.

Which case threw him the biggest loop? Justin said he initially predicted that Citizens United v. FEC would be 9-0 reverse. That “was pretty silly” he commented.

When I asked him how he predicted the votes of Justice Kennedy, Justin chuckled and said that if he had the answer to that question, “he could license that.”

Listen to the JoshCast for the rest of the story.

The second season of FantasySCOTUS will kick off on the first Monday in October. We have lots of great new features, and many new prizes, so stay tuned.

Download the JoshCast

FantasySCOTUS Featured in Reason Magazine

Many thanks to the awesome Damon Root for this great interview. Here’s a summary:

Since it launched in November 2009,FantasySCOTUS.net has attracted nearly 5,000 players and become the toast of the legal world. The brainchild of 25-year-old Josh Blackman, a graduate of George Mason University Law School and a teaching fellow at Pennsylvania State University’s Dickinson School of Law, Fantasy SCOTUS asks players to predict the outcome of Supreme Court decisions based on their knowledge of the Constitution, legal precedent, and the proclivities of various Supreme Court justices. The game is a cousin to the thriving world of prediction markets, where participants bet on real-world outcomes in everything from elections to the Academy Awards.

FantasySCOTUS: The Final Countdown and Final Predictions

Monday, June 28, 2010 will be a day that will lives in SCOTUS fame for quite some time. At 10 a.m., the Supreme Court will hand down the remaining opinions in Bilski v. Kappos, Free Enterprise Fund and Beckstead and Watts, LLP v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, and most importantly McDonald v. City of Chicago. Across the street at 12:30 p.m., Elena Kagan will begin her confirmation hearing. Supreme Court overload.

In this post, we provide final predictions for those four huge cases. Additionally, we will provide an overview of how accurate FantasySCOTUS predictions were for the cases decided in June, including Stop The Beach Renourishment v. Florida Department of Environmental Protection, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, City of Ontario v. Quon, New Process Steel v. National Labor Relations Board, and Doe v. Reed.

In Free Enterprise Fund, 67% predict the Supreme Court will affirm, and find that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act’s creation of accounting review board is constitutional. Based on the statistics, it looks it will be a unanimous decision. In Bilski 78% of our members are predicting that the Supreme Court will affirm the Federal Circuit. However, this seems to be one of the more lopsided contests, and the Justices are much more likely to be unanimous in this case than in Free Enterprise Fund. As I predicted, based on opinion assignments, Justice Stevens will likely write this one.

Predictions for McDonald and CLS after the jump at JoshBlackman.com.

FantasySCOTUS.net – Revisiting American Needle, Graham v. Florida, Comstock, and Berghuis

The Supreme Court is headed down the home stretch. Of the 86 cases argued during the October 2009 term, 59 have been decided and only 27 are remaining. While we are still waiting for results the biggest cases of the term, including McDonald v. Chicago, Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, and Doe v. Reed, the Supreme Court handed down several significant cases in May: American Needle v. NFL, Graham v. Florida, Carr v. United States, Berghuis v. Thompkins, United States v. Comstock, and Levin v. Commerce Energy. In this post we will revisit our predictions, and compare them to the outcomes We will use our standard measures to explain how confident we were of our decisions, and how accurate our forecasts were.

American Needle, a significant antitrust case, asked whether or not the NFL and its member teams counted as one entity for the purposes of merchandise licensing. The court, in a unanimous decision, reversed the 7th Circuit’s ruling that they were one entity and exempt from the Sherman Antitrust Act. Only 37% of our members predicted the reversal, and out of approximately 200 predictions, 24 got the split correct also. The SMRs for the justices indicate there was going to be a consensus, even if the direction was wrong. One easy explanation is that the majority of users thought that baseball’s antitrust exemptions would be precedential instead of a characteristic peculiar to America’s Pastime. Even in that consideration however, there is not much of an opportunity for partisan division in this opinion, although our statistics do show that there was no particular support of monopolies among the different justices and ideologies.

Graham addressed whether or not a life sentence without parole was cruel and unusual punishment for a minor who committed non-homicide offenses. The court, in a 6-3 reversal, held that it was cruel and unusual punishment. Our members were in a dead heat between reversal and affirmation, meaning that our statistics were not conclusive one way or another. Only 23 users guessed the correct split, which is a larger percentage of total votes than in American Needle. However, our SMRs are useful in that they indicated Roberts might join in a decision with Kennedy and the liberal justices. As this case was very controversial and decisive, the ambiguity of our predictions in regards to the disposition is understandable, while our other statistics still provide useful information for predicting Chief Justice Robert’s curious vote by joining the majority.

The results for Carr, Berghuis, Comstock, and Levin, after the jump.

FantasySCOTUS — What’s Taking Them So Long? Predictions for McDonald, CLS, PCAOB, Doe, and Bilksi

With Kagan’s nomination set and the all oral arguments for the October 2009 Term completed, we are still waiting for some major decisions—specifically, McDonald v. Chicago, Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, Free Enterprise v. PCAOB, Bilski v. Kappos, and Doe v. Reed. In this post, we will offer predictions for these huge cases. Additionally, our statistics might also give us an insight into what is causing the delay within the SCOTUS on handing down these opinions.