Blog

The lecture notes are here, and the live chat is here.

This is the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments, authored by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other leading suffragists at the Seneca Falls Convention in July of 1848. Relevant to our discussions are the provisions concerning coverture, and the inability of women to own, use, and dispose of property. Among the other “”injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman”:

• He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.
• He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.
• He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes of divorce, in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given; as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of the women—the law, in all cases, going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of a man, and giving all power into his hands.

The 19th Amendment, which prevented states from denying the franchise to woman, was ratified on August 18, 1920.

 

 

This is Edith Windsor, the face of United States v. Windsor.

The velocity of courts invalidating bans on same-sex marriage has been striking.

This forecast from fall of 2013 proved entirely inaccurate.

 

Here is an updated poll from March 2013.

By October of 2014, over 30 states now recognized same-sex marriage, and the rest have appeals pending. This number changes daily.

Texas Code 2.401 governs “common law” or “informal marriage”

 

The lecture notes are here. The live chat is here.

When you think of a Chimney Sweep, this image may come to mind.

But this image is probably a lot closer to young Master Armory.

 

 

This diagram shows the different ways a sweep can get stuck in a flue.

Frequently the boys would get stuck (the image on the right).

Here are some examples of de Lamerie’s work (courtesy of the Dukeminier property web site).

 

 

 

Here are a number of stories about finding abandoned stuff:

• New York Times article on a jobless man’s find of early Anglo-Saxon treasure in Staffordshire, England, September 2009
• Article on on-going dispute over ownership of Titanic artifacts, Mar. 2009
• NPR story St. Louis’s byzantine process for dealing with lost property, Mar. 2009
• Divers discover thousands of pearls while searching Santa Maria, June 2007
• Odyssey Marine Exploration fights with Spanish government over $500 million in coins recovered from sunken ship, May 2007
• New Yorker article on Odyssey Marine Exploration, April 2008
• Sub Sea Research battles Spain & France over $3 billion of treasure, January 2003
• New York Times article on people who live by finding things in the garbage
• Discovering a ring that was lost 60 years ago

This is a lithograph of Gwernaylod House in Overton-on-Dee, Wales (1829)

Here is a trailer for a fascinating documentary about the legal fight between two men who claim to have caught Barry Bonds’s record-breaking 73 homerun in 2004.

And here is the moment it hits the crowd.

Sometime earlier this week I published my 8,00th post on JoshBlackman.com. I hit post number 7,000 on January 21, 2014, so it took roughly 6 months to write 1,000 posts. I hit 5,000 posts on 12/19/2012. I launched this blog on September 27, 2009. I hit 1,500 posts on 1/19/2011 and 2,000 posts on 5/10/2011. During my hiatus from August 2011 to August 2012, I hit 3,000 posts on 11/14/2011, 3,500 posts on 2/1/2012, 4,000 posts on 4/13/2012, and 4,500 posts on 7/27/2012.

Also, at some point last month I crossed the 1,000,000 visitor threshold.

Dylan Matthews of Vox interviewed me and my co-author Mike Bommarito about our Supreme Court prediction model, developed also with Dan Katz.

We haven’t gotten nearly that far in predicting court cases. But three scholars — South Texas College of Law’s Josh Blackman, Michigan State’s Daniel Martin Katz, and Bommarito Consulting‘s Michael Bommarito —  have built a model that comes close. As Blackman noted in a blog post announcing the model, it “correctly identifies 69.7% of the Supreme Court’s overall affirm and reverse decisions and correctly forecasts 70.9% of the votes of individual justices across 7,700 cases and more than 68,000 justice votes.”

Dylan also highlights the nuanced manner in which we approach ideology.

The process seems extremely complicated, but Bommarito and Blackman note that you can still draw conclusions about the way the court behaves from it. For one thing, Bommarito notes that ideological variables seem to make a major difference, which seems to refute the naive view that the Court is somehow above politics. “If there were an argument ongoing between political scientists and lawyers as to what mattered, as to whether judges are really independent judicial reasoning machines on high, or whether they’re just political animals like anyone else, then in terms of the features that the model uses to successfully predict, it appears they’re just political animals,” he concludes.

Blackman caveats that a bit. For one thing, a lot of the Court’s decisions are uncontroversial 9-0 reversals of lower courts: a lower court got it wrong, every justice agrees about it, and they act together. And the model gets those right very often, and struggles with the one in three cases where the court ultimately affirms the lower court’s ruling:

The model can only do that well if it brings non-ideological variables into play. “The set of ‘case information variables’ — which includes the lower court where the case the originated, the issue, who the petitioner and respondent are, etc — contributed 23% of predictive power,” Blackman explains. “These were among the most predictive factors, and are factors that most people in the press don’t think about.”

All the same, if anyone still labors under the misimpression that the Court’s political views don’t matter, the model should give them reason to reconsider. Bommarito puts it in statistical terms: “The null hypothesis for legal academia is that ideology doesn’t matter; we’ve rejected that hypothesis.”

The most important element is the conclusion. Dylan really hits home where our research is leading.

From there, it’s on to lower courts. Supreme Court cases, while high-impact, are pretty few in number and are already widely predicted. The authors plan on using the model as private consultants, and the real growth market there is in predicting outcomes in district and appellate court cases. There isn’t as strong of a database in that area yet, but Blackman and Bommarito are optimistic. “When you look at the average law firm, they’re swimming in data that’s not very well collected and not very well structured,” Bommarito says. Collating that data into practical models could make a real difference for lawyers plotting their court and negotiation strategies. It could also potentially help legislators get a sense of how vulnerable laws they pass could be to a legal challenge. And of course, academics studying lower courts could find an effective model valuable too.

Want to learn more about the model? Check out David Kravets’ post at Ars Technica on it, Blackman’s blog post, the article the authors wrote describing it, or the model’s Github page. And don’t forget to click the toggle above to read my full interview with Blackman and Bommarito.

And in case you were wondering (I was), the reporters at Vox type their own transcripts. No court reporters involved. You can read the entire interview here.

In his dissental in Elmbrook School District v. Doe, Justice Scalia explains why, in light of Town of Greece, this case should have been GVR’d.

In addition to being decided incorrectly, this case bears other indicia of what we have come to call “certworthiness.” The Seventh Circuit’s decision was en banc and prompted three powerful dissents (by then-Chief Judge Easterbrook and Judges Posner and Ripple). And it con- flicts with decisions that have long allowed graduation ceremonies to take place in churches…

According to the prevailing standard, a GVR order is potentially appropriate where “intervening developments . . . reveal a reasonable probability that the decision below rests upon a premise that the lower court would reject if given the opportunity for further consideration, and where it appears that such a redetermination may determine the ultimate outcome of the litigation.” Lawrence v. Chater, 516 U. S. 163, 167 (1996) (per curiam). The Court has found that standard satisfied on numerous occasions where judgments were far less obviously undermined by a subsequent decision of ours. For these reasons, we should either grant the petition and set the case for argument or GVR in light of Town of Greece. I respectfully dissent from the denial of certiorari.

As an aside, is it “certworthy” or “cert-worthy”?  I found three other hits in the Supreme Court database for “certworthy. Two by Justice Brennan, and one by Justice Harlan II, that seems to be the first ever entry in the U.S. Reports.

Accordingly, while I believe the case is not ‘certworthy,’ I would affirm the judgment below. Tipton v. Socony Mobil Oil Co., 375 U.S. 34, 38, 84 S. Ct. 1, 3, 11 L. Ed. 2d 4 (1963)(Harlan, J., dissenting from denial of certiorari).

I question that this case was “certworthy.” The game hardly seems worth the candle. Marshall v. Lonberger, 459 U.S. 422, 447, 103 S. Ct. 843, 857, 74 L. Ed. 2d 646 (1983) (Brennan, J., dissenting).

Therefore, the Court’s conclusion that the claim raised by Williams is not “certworthy” is directly contradicted by the Court’s previous actions in Pulley. Maggio v. Williams, 464 U.S. 46, 58, 104 S. Ct. 311, 318, 78 L. Ed. 2d 43 (1983)(Brennan, J., dissenting).

Though, practitioners seem to hedge with the hyphenate. His former law clerk, Paul Clements spells it as a hyphenate in the cert petition in an NLRB appeal: “cert-worthy.”

This case not only presents three related but independently cert-worthy questions, such that there is an unusually strong likelihood that this Court would review should the Court of Appeals affirm, but also involves particularly strong equities that make the risk of irreparable injury absent a stay concrete and acute

I checked the Westlaw database for cert petitions: there are 499 hits for “certworthy” and 696 hits for “cert-worthy.”

In one of my earliest blog posts, I noted how similar “cert-worthy” was to “sponge-worthy” from Seinfield?