The Supreme Court Computer

Scholarly article on Curt Flood\u27s lawsuit against major league baseball over the right to be a free agent

An Outside Educator Views Michigan\u27s Legal Education from the Inside

Harold J. Spaeth is a Michigan State University political science professor who has attracted considerable attention for his computer predictions of the outcomes of U.S. Supreme Court cases. Over the past seven years, his predictions are said to have had an accuracy rate of more than 93 percent. Spaeth\u27s approach is to analyze the voting records of justices to determine personal attitudes and other factors influencing their decisions. He says these voting records are usually more revealing than legal theories which may mask the underlaying motivations in the particular judgment. A U-M law student since the summer of 1979, the 50-year-old professor says a law degree will assist my future writing and research, and better equip me to do consulting work for attorneys who try cases before the Supreme Court. In the summer of 1979, after 25 years behind a podium, I became a student at the Law School. Call it role reversal with a vengeance. Now, 14 months and 45 credits later, some observations on the producers, products, and processes of legal education at the University of Michiga

Measuring Quality of Mental Health Care: An International Comparison

The International Initiative for Mental Health Leadership (IIMHL) (www.iimhl.com) is a unique international collaborative that focuses on improving mental health and addiction services. IIMHL is a collaboration of eight countries including Australia, England, Canada, New Zealand, Republic of Ireland, Scotland, Sweden and USA. The project, “Measuring Quality of Mental Health Care: An International Comparison”, was initiated by a group of clinical experts under the auspices of the IIMHL Clinical Leaders Group. Led by Prof. Harold Pincus from Columbia University in New York, the project aims to not only raise awareness among clinicians and policymakers regarding the quality of care of the mental health systems they are working in, but ultimately to be able to compare system performance across countries to inform initiatives for transformation of mental health services

ICD-11 for quality and safety: overview of the who quality and safety topic advisory group

This paper outlines the approach that the WHO's Family of International Classifications (WHO-FIC) network is undertaking to create ICD-11. We also outline the more focused work of the Quality and Safety Topic Advisory Group, whose activities include the following: (i) cataloguing existing ICD-9 and ICD-10 quality and safety indicators; (ii) reviewing ICD morbidity coding rules for main condition, diagnosis timing, numbers of diagnosis fields and diagnosis clustering; (iii) substantial restructuring of the health-care related injury concepts coded in the ICD-10 chapters 19/20, (iv) mapping of ICD-11 quality and safety concepts to the information model of the WHO's International Classification for Patient Safety and the AHRQ Common Formats; (v) the review of vertical chapter content in all chapters of the ICD-11 beta version and (vi) downstream field testing of ICD-11 prior to its official 2015 release. The transition from ICD-10 to ICD-11 promises to produce an enhanced classification that will have better potential to capture important concepts relevant to measuring health system safety and quality—an important use case for the classificatio

An Outside Educator Views Michigan\u27s Legal Education from the Inside

Harold J. Spaeth is a Michigan State University political science professor who has attracted considerable attention for his computer predictions of the outcomes of U.S. Supreme Court cases. Over the past seven years, his predictions are said to have had an accuracy rate of more than 93 percent. Spaeth\u27s approach is to analyze the voting records of justices to determine personal attitudes and other factors influencing their decisions. He says these voting records are usually more revealing than legal theories which may mask the underlaying motivations in the particular judgment. A U-M law student since the summer of 1979, the 50-year-old professor says a law degree will assist my future writing and research, and better equip me to do consulting work for attorneys who try cases before the Supreme Court. In the summer of 1979, after 25 years behind a podium, I became a student at the Law School. Call it role reversal with a vengeance. Now, 14 months and 45 credits later, some observations on the producers, products, and processes of legal education at the University of Michiga

Replication data for: The Norm of Consensus on the U.S. Supreme Court

For four decades scholars have sought to explain the rise of dissensus on the U.S. Supreme Court. While the specific explanations they offer vary, virtually all rest on a common story: During the 19th (and into the 20th) century, the Supreme Court followed a norm of consensus. That is, the justices may have privately disagreed over the outcomes of cases but masked their disagreement from the public by producing consensual opinions. The problem with this story is that its underlying assumption lacks an empirical basis. Simply put, there is no systematic evidence to show that a norm of consensus ever existed on the Court. We attempt to provide such evidence by turning to the docket books of Chief Justice Waite (1874-1888), and making the following argument: If a norm of consensus induced unanimity on Courts of by-gone eras, then the norm may have manifested itself through public unanimity in the face of private conference disagreements. Our investigation, which provides systematic support for this argument and thus for the existence of a norm of consensus, raises important questions about publicly -unified decision-making bodies, be they courts or other political organizations

Assessing Preference Change on the U.S. Supreme Court ∗

the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences with funds from the University Initiatives Fund at the University of Washington. Supplementary results, a replication dataset, and documented C++ code to estimate the model using the Scythe Statistical Library (Martin and Quinn, 2001) are available in a web appendix at the authors ’ websites. The datasets were built from the Original United States Supreme Court Database (Spaeth, 2001a), the Vinson-Warren Court Database (Spaeth, 2001b), and a dataset generously provided by Le