Fantasy SCOTUS

FantasySCOTUS.net: The Influence of (soon to be retiring?) Justice John Paul Stevens

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Ed. note: ATL has teamed up with the 10th Justice to predict how the Supreme Court may decide upcoming cases. CNN has called FantasySCOTUS the “hottest new fantasy-league game.”
Tom Goldstein predicted Justice Stevens will retire at the end of the term. He’s getting his own sitcom, so it must be true  And in honor of Stevens’ looming retirement and the attendant circus, this week’s installment of the 10th Justice will consider Stevens’ behavior in the 14 cases that have been decided this term. We will show how users perceive Justice John Paul Stevens.


For this post, we will be using outcome percentages and standardized majority ratios (SMR), along with their respective confidence intervals. Confidence intervals are synonymous with the margin of errors used in polls. In the language of outcome percentages, the confidence interval determines how far our percentage needs to be from 50% to be determinative about what users predict the outcome will be. In the language of SMRs, the confidence interval determines how far the SMR needs to be from 1 to determine if the difference is statistically significant.
All confidence intervals are dependent on confidence levels, which is the likelihood that the true value is within the interval. Confidence levels are indicated directly next to the Outcome CIs, while the SMR assumes a confidence level of 95%. The information for both metrics and their confidence intervals is contained in tables for the cases, grouped according to some properties observed in their statistics.
First set:

These five cases can be understood as the result of properly measured statistics. In all of the cases, the outcome was correctly predicted by a majority of FantasySCOTUS members at a 99% confidence level. As shown by the width of the confidence interval, all of the cases vary in number of predictions. However, the most interesting aspect is that Stevens’ SMR in each case telegraphed the possible outcome. Citizens United fell along partisan lines, but Stevens’ SMR in the case indicated that he was likely to withhold his vote from the majority (the difference below 1 is statistically significant), and given the tone of his dissent, that was certainly the case. The other cases, with SMRs significantly above 1, indicated that Stevens was likely to “defect” to the “conservative” majority. The outcome of the cases supports the inference of the statistics since all four of the cases were unanimous decisions.
More results on how Justice John Paul Stevens affects the Justices, and what his retirement could mean to the Court, after the jump.

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