Fantasy SCOTUS, SCOTUS, Supreme Court

FantasySCOTUS: Revisiting American Needle, Graham v. Florida, Comstock, and Berghuis

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The Supreme Court is headed down the home stretch. Of the 86 cases argued during the October 2009 term, 59 have been decided and only 27 are remaining.

While we are still waiting for results the biggest cases of the term, including McDonald v. Chicago, Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, and Doe v. Reed, the Supreme Court handed down several significant cases in May: American Needle v. NFL, Graham v. Florida, Carr v. United States, Berghuis v. Thompkins, United States v. Comstock, and Levin v. Commerce Energy.

In this post, we will revisit our predictions and compare them to the outcomes. We will use our standard measures to explain how confident we were of our decisions, and how accurate our forecasts were.

Case ANI Graham Carr Berghuis Comstock Levin
Outcome Reverse

37%

 Reverse 50% Reverse 43% Reverse 64% Reverse 38% Reverse 45%
Outcome CI +/-10.71 % (99%) NS NS +/- 10.86 % (95%) +/- 11.86 % (99%) NS
Correct Split 24 23 10 16 10 7
Roberts 1.25 +/- .24 1.34 +/- .21 1.24 +/- .31 1.1 +/- .3 1.23 +/- .26 1.29 +/- .4
Stevens 1.84 +/- .38 1.09 +/- .19 1.39 +/- .38 1.26 +/- .42 1.74 +/- .4 1.52 +/- .5
Scalia 1.16 +/- .23 1.02 +/- .18 1.18 +/- .3 1.08 +/- .29 0.96 +/- .23 1.29 +/- .42
Thomas 1.05 +/- .22 1.03 +/- .18 1.1+/- .29 1.1 +/- .3 0.91 +/- .23 1.29 +/- .42
Ginsburg 1.86 +/- .38 1.08 +/- .19 1.58 +/- .4 1.48 +/- .46 1.67 +/- .39 1.35 +/- .47
Breyer 1.74 +/- .37 1.14 +/- .19 1.53 +/- .39 1.63 +/- .48 1.79 +/- .4 1.39 +/- .48
Alito 1.07 +/- .22 1.1 +/- .19 1.06 +/- .29 1.06 +/- .29 1.01 +/- .24 1.21 +/- .41
Sotomayor 1.92 +/- .38 1.21 +/- .2 1.42 +/- .38 1.48 +/- .46 1.76 +/- .4 1.22 +/- .45

American Needle, a significant antitrust case, asked whether or not the NFL and its member teams counted as one entity for the purposes of merchandise licensing. The court, in a unanimous decision, reversed the 7th Circuit’s ruling that they were one entity and exempt from the Sherman Antitrust Act. Only 37% of our members predicted the reversal, and out of approximately 200 predictions, 24 got the split correct also. The SMRs for the justices indicate there was going to be a consensus, even if the direction was wrong. One easy explanation is that the majority of users thought that baseball’s antitrust exemptions would be precedential instead of a characteristic peculiar to America’s Pastime. Even in that consideration however, there is not much of an opportunity for partisan division in this opinion, although our statistics do show that there was no particular support of monopolies among the different justices and ideologies.

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Graham addressed whether or not a life sentence without parole was cruel and unusual punishment for a minor who committed non-homicide offenses. The court, in a 6-3 reversal, held that it was cruel and unusual punishment. Our members were in a dead heat between reversal and affirmation, meaning that our statistics were not conclusive one way or another. Only 23 users guessed the correct split, which is a larger percentage of total votes than in American Needle. However, our SMRs are useful in that they indicated Roberts might join in a decision with Kennedy and the liberal justices. As this case was very controversial and decisive, the ambiguity of our predictions in regards to the disposition is understandable, while our other statistics still provide useful information for predicting Chief Justice Robert’s curious vote by joining the majority.

The results for Carr, Berghuis, Comstock, and Levin are available over at JoshBlackman.com….

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