FantasySCOTUS: Enough About Kagan! What about the cases?

Need a SCOTUS diversion from the Kagan-Palooza? Look no further (although we will note that FantasySCOTUS.net correctly predicted Kagan would get the nod from the very beginning).

The Supreme Court decided several important cases during the month of April, and in this post we will consider them, and see how accurate the league was in predicting those cases. We take a look at United States v. Stevens, Perdue, Merck Co., Stolt Nielsen, and Salazar v. Buono. While our members did not predict that vandals would reverse the Supreme Court’s opinion in Salazar by stealing the memorial cross, these diverse cases help to explain user perceptions of these issues, and in what circumstances predictions are less precise.

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The table lists these five cases, their outcomes (with confidence intervals), number of users who correctly guessed the split, and finally, the standardized majority ratio, which tests whether or not users perceive the Court as dominated by conservative ideology, for each Justice.

United States v. Stevens considered the constitutionality of a statute banning depictions of animal cruelty. Out of over 600 predictions, over 83% of the members corrected predicted that the Supreme Court would affirm the Third Circuit’s opinion. Specifically, 98 users, representing 15% of the total predictions, correctly guess that the split would be 8-1. With only Justice Alito dissenting, this was an unusual split.

While the predictions for affirmation were clear, the users by no means indicated that the decision would be unanimous. Looking at the SMRs, the real question for users was whether or not the conservative Justices would take the expanded view of 1st Amendment speech over a law and order viewpoint. The liberal justices were considered highly likely to join the majority, with SMRs all above 4, while the conservative Justices were all significantly below 1. However, the users predicted that the holdout tendency would be weak among Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas, but strong for Alito. In this sense, our data forecasted that Alito would be the sole disenter. And in light of the 8-1 split, our data was accurate.

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