3 ms·

You might be right. But our current system is already egregiously abused with minimal cleverness. One can predict with high accuracy a SC Justice's vote on mo

by DevX101 12y ago

You might be right. But our current system is already egregiously abused with minimal cleverness. One can predict with high accuracy a SC Justice's vote on most cases based on the political party of the president who appointed him/her.

rpedela 12y ago
Overall it seems to self-correct which sometimes takes decades. While flawed, it is pretty good.
dragonwriter 12y ago
> One can predict with high accuracy a SC Justice's vote on most cases based on the political party of the president who appointed him/her. Having taken a number of law and judicial politics courses, I can say this has been studied and its not at all true. You can tell with some accuracy a SC Justice's vote on issues that had high political salience at the time the individual justice was appointed by the position of the appointing administration on those issues, but predicting votes by party identification fails rather drastically for most other issues. There's a few evergreen issues that have had both high political salience and fairly consistent partisan breakdown of positions over a long time (e.g., abortion, gun control), and so these issues tend to be pretty consistently predictable by party ID. OTOH, most issues aren't like that (though issues that get lots of mainstream news coverage are disproportionately likely to be -- though even there many aren't), and issues like the particular one here (whether APIs are within the scope of copyright) haven't ever had high political salience.
- danielweber 12y ago
  Yeah, that comment was silly. SCOTUS decides ~100 cases a year, and less than 10 are 5-4 decisions. Even even some of the 5-4 votes aren't split along ideological lines. Sometimes you can predict how a given Justice will act, based on how he feels about the specifics of similar cases.

3 ms·

You might be right. But our current system is already egregiously abused with minimal cleverness. One can predict with high accuracy a SC Justice's vote on mo

by DevX101 12y ago

rpedela 12y ago
Overall it seems to self-correct which sometimes takes decades. While flawed, it is pretty good.
dragonwriter 12y ago
> One can predict with high accuracy a SC Justice's vote on most cases based on the political party of the president who appointed him/her. Having taken a number of law and judicial politics courses, I can say this has been studied and its not at all true. You can tell with some accuracy a SC Justice's vote on issues that had high political salience at the time the individual justice was appointed by the position of the appointing administration on those issues, but predicting votes by party identification fails rather drastically for most other issues. There's a few evergreen issues that have had both high political salience and fairly consistent partisan breakdown of positions over a long time (e.g., abortion, gun control), and so these issues tend to be pretty consistently predictable by party ID. OTOH, most issues aren't like that (though issues that get lots of mainstream news coverage are disproportionately likely to be -- though even there many aren't), and issues like the particular one here (whether APIs are within the scope of copyright) haven't ever had high political salience.
- danielweber 12y ago
  Yeah, that comment was silly. SCOTUS decides ~100 cases a year, and less than 10 are 5-4 decisions. Even even some of the 5-4 votes aren't split along ideological lines. Sometimes you can predict how a given Justice will act, based on how he feels about the specifics of similar cases.