Justice Blocks and Predictability of U.S. Supreme Court Votes

Guimerà R, Sales-Pardo M (2011) Justice Blocks and Predictability of U.S. Supreme Court Votes. PLoS ONE 6(11): e27188. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0027188
Successful attempts to predict judges’ votes shed light into how legal decisions are made and, ultimately, into the behavior and evolution of the judiciary. Here, we investigate to what extent it is possible to make predictions of a justice’s vote based on the other justices’ votes in the same case.