The DOI matches its Crossref record; 31 of the 31 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
A general approach for predicting the behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States
Open accessAbstract
Building on developments in machine learning and prior work in the science of judicial prediction, we construct a model designed to predict the behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States in a generalized, out-of-sample context. To do so, we develop a time-evolving random forest classifier that leverages unique feature engineering to predict more than 240,000 justice votes and 28,000 cases outcomes over nearly two centuries (1816-2015). Using only data available prior to decision, our model outperforms null (baseline) models at both the justice and case level under both parametric and non-parametric tests. Over nearly two centuries, we achieve 70.2% accuracy at the case outcome level and 71.9% at the justice vote level. More recently, over the past century, we outperform an in-sample optimized null model by nearly 5%. Our performance is consistent with, and improves on the general level of prediction demonstrated by prior work; however, our model is distinctive because it can be applied out-of-sample to the entire past and future of the Court, not a single term. Our results represent an important advance for the science of quantitative legal prediction and portend a range of other potential applications.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Breiman, L. (2001) · Machine Learning · doi:10.1023/a:1010933404324 · Cited by 133,538
Scikit-learn: Machine Learning in Python
Pedregosa, F., Varoquaux, G., Gramfort, A., Michel, V., Thirion, B., Grisel, O., Blondel, M., Müller, A., Nothman, J., Louppe, G., et al. (2012) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1201.0490 · Cited by 71,016
Classification and Regression Trees.
Gordon, A. D., Breiman, L., Friedman, J. H., Olshen, R. A., & Stone, C. J. (1984) · Biometrics · doi:10.2307/2530946 · Cited by 23,522
Classification and Regression Trees.
Ryzin, J. V., Breiman, L., Friedman, J. H., Olshen, R. A., & Stone, C. J. (1986) · Journal of the American Statistical Association · doi:10.2307/2288003 · Cited by 20,825
Classification And Regression Trees
Breiman, L., Friedman, J. H., Olshen, R. A., & Stone, C. J. (2017) · doi:10.1201/9781315139470 · Cited by 11,417
An empirical comparison of supervised learning algorithms
Caruana, R., & Niculescu-Mizil, A. (2006) · Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on Machine learning - ICML '06 · doi:10.1145/1143844.1143865 · Cited by 2,780
Online Learning and Online Convex Optimization
Shalev-Shwartz, S. (2012) · Foundations and Trends® in Machine Learning · doi:10.1561/2200000018 · Cited by 1,246
The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited
Segal, J. A., & Spaeth, H. J. (2002) · Cambridge University Press eBooks · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511615696 · Cited by 1,165
Dynamic Ideal Point Estimation via Markov Chain Monte Carlo for the U.S. Supreme Court, 1953–1999
Martin, A. D., & Quinn, K. M. (2002) · Political Analysis · doi:10.1093/pan/10.2.134 · Cited by 1,144
Online Learning and Online Convex Optimization
Shalev-Shwartz, S. (2011) · now publishers, Inc. eBooks · doi:10.1561/9781601985477 · Cited by 1,095
Cited by
On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models
Bommasani, R., Hudson, D. A., Adeli, E., Altman, R., Arora, S., von Arx, S., Bernstein, M. S., Bohg, J., Bosselut, A., Brunskill, E., et al. (2021) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2108.07258 · Cited by 2,676
Iteratively Questioning and Answering for Interpretable Legal Judgment Prediction
Zhong, H., Wang, Y., Tu, C., Zhang, T., Liu, Z., & Sun, M. (2020) · Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence · doi:10.1609/aaai.v34i01.5479 · Cited by 113
LexGLUE: A Benchmark Dataset for Legal Language Understanding in English
Chalkidis, I., Jana, A., Hartung, D., Bommarito, M. J., Androutsopoulos, I., Katz, D. M., & Aletras, N. (2021) · SSRN Electronic Journal · doi:10.2139/ssrn.3936759 · Cited by 111
Self-citationAI and professional liability assessment in healthcare. a revolution in legal medicine?
Terranova, C., Cestonaro, C., Fava, L., & Cinquetti, A. (2024) · Frontiers in Medicine · doi:10.3389/fmed.2023.1337335 · Cited by 73
Semi-Supervised Methods for Explainable Legal Prediction
Branting, K., Weiss, B., Brown, B., Pfeifer, C., Chakraborty, A., Ferro, L., Pfaff, M., & Yeh, A. (2019) · Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law · doi:10.1145/3322640.3326723 · Cited by 43
Metadata
- Authors
- Katz, D. M., Bommarito, M. J., & Blackman, J.
- Venue
- PLOS ONE
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Published
- 2017-04-12
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- e0174698
- ISSN
- 1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3122334902
- Cited by
- 528
- References
- 31
- FWCI
- 206.93
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: A general approach for predicting the behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1371/journal.pone.0174698
- The paper
- Katz, D. M., Bommarito, M. J., & Blackman, J. (2017). A general approach for predicting the behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States. PLOS ONE. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0174698
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.