Sim et al.: The Utility of Text: The Case of Amicus Briefs and the Supreme Court

Yanchuan Sim , Bryan Routledge , and Noah A. Smith presented a paper entitled The Utility of Text: The Case of Amicus Briefs and the Supreme Court , at New Directions in Text as Data 2014, held 10-11 October 2014 at Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management.

Here is the abstract:

We explore the idea that authoring a piece of text is an act of maximizing one’s expected utility. To make this idea concrete, we consider the societally important decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States. Extensive past work in quantitative political science provides a framework for empirically modeling the decisions of justices and how they relate to text. We incorporate into such a model texts authored by amici curiae (“friends of the court” separate from the litigants) who seek to weigh in on the decision, then explicitly model their goals in a random utility model. We demonstrate the benefits of this approach in improved vote prediction and the ability to perform counterfactual analysis.

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Conference papers, Methodology, Research findings Tagged: Amicus briefs, Bayesian models in quantitative legal prediction, Bryan Routledge, Court information systems, Econometric models in legal informatics, Judicial information systems, Legal text processing, Modeling goals of amici curiae, Modeling judicial decisions, Natural language processing and law, NDTAD, NDTAD 2014, New Directions in Text as Data, New Directions in Text as Data 2014, Noah A. Smith, Noah Smith, Predicting court decisions, Predicting judicial decisions, Quantitative legal prediction, Statistical methods in legal informatics, U.S. Supreme Court decisions, Utility maximization models and legal informatics, Yanchuan Sim



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