SUPREME COURT INDEPENDENCE, BY THE NUMBERS from The Washington Post
For years, two schools of thought have debated how the Supreme Court makes decisions. Are the nine justices simply "politicians in robes," destined by ideology to vote a certain way, or are they independent actors, whose opinions reflect their times, their experience and, most of all, the law itself?
Mathematician Lawrence Sirovich, of Mount Sinai School of Medicine's Laboratory of Applied Mathematics in New York, stepped into this morass last month, introducing a purely mathematical model to gauge the justices' independence simply by cataloguing how often each one sides with the majority or the minority.
Using the techniques of information theory, Sirovich analyzed 468 opinions by the "Second Rehnquist Court" between 1994 and 2002 to assess how often the justices seemed to fit into predictable ideological boxes. Information theory is a mathematical tool designed to highlight the "unexpected" in complicated systems -- such as a nine-headed Supreme Court.
Complete article:
<<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48694-2003Jul25.html>>
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