Signatures of Ideology: The Case of the Supreme Court\u27s Criminal Docket

Everyone suspects that Supreme Court justices\u27 own views of policy play a part in their decisions, but the size and nature of the part is a matter of vague impression and frequent dispute. Do their preferences exert some pressure at the margin or are they better viewed as the mainsprings of decision? The latter claim, identified with legal realism, has been lent some support by political scientists who point out that some justices regularly vote for or against certain kinds of claims (for example, under the Fourth Amendment), or that votes in some areas are broadly predictable according to a single ideal point that tries to sum up each justice\u27s preferences, or that justices who dissent from a decision often will not acquiesce to it in future cases. The reason these studies haven\u27t made much of an impression in the legal academy probably is that lawyers and scholars sense many reasons why judges\u27 behavior may follow predictable patterns, not all of them related to their own preferences. Some justices may have ideas about interpretation that happen to produce outcomes friendly to one side or another as byproducts; and a judge\u27s public reputation as a conservative or liberal, to which some of the political science work gives weight in explaining votes, likewise might arise because the judge\u27s interpretive approach happens to yield results that conservatives or liberals like. A closer look is needed at judicial behavior in cases where the policy stakes are similar but the sources of interpretive dispute are different, the better to reveal which dominates which. The best set of such cases is found on the Supreme Court\u27s criminal docket. Cases involving accused or convicted criminals raise all sorts of legal issues but can be seen to involve a common set of policy stakes: the courts have to referee disputes, often of a zero-sum character, over the advantages to be enjoyed by the government and the accused or convicted defendant. Of course one also can divide up criminal cases into narrower categories that may involve different policies; we will try it later. But the hypothesis that all such cases involve similar rough trade-offs as a matter of policy is a useful starting point. It gives us many decisions to study; cases about criminals usually take up around a third of the Court\u27s docket every term, which is enough to support interesting statistical inquiries and generalizations

The Economics of Enmity

This Article considers whether courts should regard enmity between litigants as a transaction cost and thus as a justification for awarding damages when a property right would otherwise be available as a remedy. It begins by examining the phenomenon of enmity generally, and concludes that enmities can be both ethically justified and instrumentally useful depending on their origins. The normative status of enmity also depends on the consequences of how it is expressed. The law understandably tends to punish enmity when it motivates out-of-pocket expenditures to make someone else worse off, but generally not when it motivates the absorption of opportunity costs for that purpose. It is very difficult for courts to distinguish between good and bad enmities, however, and the Article argues that in most cases the best way for courts to cope with this uncertainty is to disregard enmity when fashioning remedies. Exceptions to the rule may be warranted in cases where particular enmities readily can be identified as offensive to public policy or where they will create significant costs for courts or innocent third parties. The Article defends these views against the claim that enmity is best understood as a variety of emotion that justifies damages remedies in cases where it is likely to be pervasive

Dustin Guzior and Anup Malani, Implicit Bias in Legal Interpretation

What role do policy preferences play when a judge or any other reader decides what a statute or other legal text means? Most judges think of themselves as doing law, not politics. Yet the observable decisions that judges make often follow patterns that are hard to explain by anything other than policy preferences. Indeed, if one presses the implications of the data too hard, it is likely to be heard as an accusation of bad faith—a claim that the judge or other decision-maker isn\u27t really earnest in trying to separate preference from judgment. This does not advance the discussion, and distracts from the possibility of more interesting explanations. A promising antidote, we believe, lies in empirical study not just of large numbers of judicial decisions collected over time, as previous scholars have done, but of the immediate experience of legal interpretation. We compile, and here present, rich evidence of what happens when lawyers in training are asked in controlled surveys to distinguish between their policy preferences on the one hand and their own interpretive judgments or predictions about courts judgments on the other. Our findings offer two lessons. First and foremost, they suggest that separating policy preferences from judgments about the meaning of statutes is very difficult. The same is true of preferences and predictions about what courts will do: respondents tend to predict that courts will do what the respondents themselves prefer. The fundamental entanglement of preferences and interpretation raises important questions about the ability of anyone – including judges – to neutrally carry out interpretive strategies meant to generate answers in close cases. Second, however, the results also show that certain ways of framing the interpretive question can reduce the influence of preference on interpretation—though perhaps not its effect on predictions. Instead of simply asking respondents how they would interpret the text of a statute or how the drafters would likely want it applied, it is better to ask respondents how ordinary readers would interpret the statute. This framing of the interpretative question can debias an individual\u27s interpretation of a statute. In short, interpretative theories that elevate text alone or give the intent of drafters are both susceptible to contamination by private preferences. To immunize interpretation from these preferences, a theory that asks how ordinary readers would read a statute may be the best prescription

Identifying spatio-temporal patterns of transboundary disease spread: examples using avian influenza H5N1 outbreaks

Characterizing spatio-temporal patterns among epidemics in which the mechanism of spread is uncertain is important for generating disease spread hypotheses, which may in turn inform disease control and prevention strategies. Using a dataset representing three phases of highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 outbreaks in village poultry in Romania, 2005–2006, spatio-temporal patterns were characterized. We first fit a set of hierarchical Bayesian models that quantified changes in the spatio-temporal relative risk for each of the 23 affected counties. We then modeled spatial synchrony in each of the three epidemic phases using non-parametric covariance functions and Thin Plate Spline regression models. We found clear differences in the spatio-temporal patterns among the epidemic phases (local versus regional correlated processes), which may indicate differing spread mechanisms (for example wild bird versus human-mediated). Elucidating these patterns allowed us to postulate that a shift in the primary mechanism of disease spread may have taken place between the second and third phases of this epidemic. Information generated by such analyses could assist affected countries in determining the most appropriate control programs to implement, and to allocate appropriate resources to preventing contact between domestic poultry and wild birds versus enforcing bans on poultry movements and quarantine. The methods used in this study could be applied in many different situations to analyze transboundary disease data in which only location and time of occurrence data are reported

Attraction to Physical Activity for Youth Who are BVI/DHH at a Residential School

Youth who are blind or visually impaired (BVI) and youth who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) often have low participation in sport and regular physical activity. Minimal research has sought to explore the variables associated with relatively low involvement in sport and physical activity among youth with BVI and/or DHH at residential schools. Financial situations and budget cuts have forced many states to combine residential schools for low incidence disabilities such as BVI & DHH. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the nature of attraction to physical activity for those attending a residential school for DHH and BVI. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 11 school residents (n = 5 blind; 3 male, 2 female and n = 6 deaf; 4 male, 2 female) who ranged in age from 10-18 years. Deductive content analyses revealed a number of meaningful themes in each category for both disability groups. Findings suggest that both hearing and visually impaired youth enjoyed physical activity and valued health benefits. However, this desire did not translate into being physically active. Youth suggested barriers for this including low parental encouragement for sport and physical activity and some social exclusion from non-disabled peers in game settings