Tomorrow the Court will hear a trio of consolidated cases concerning Texas’s redistricting for the 2012 elections.  At issue is the power of a three judge federal court in Texas to redraw a number of district maps as interim measures while Texas seeks the preclearence required by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Because of looming primaries, the Supreme Court expedited briefing of these cases and scheduled them for argument barely a month after staying the district court’s order. The Court’s resolution of these cases–expected relatively quickly by the Court’s standards–could impact the 2012 elections.

Over the course of three days in March, the Court will hear a number of issues relating to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (more familiar by its sobriquet “Obamacare”). As one of the centerpieces of President Obama’s domestic agenda, the Court’s decisions will almost certainly become political fodder on the eve of the 2012 Presidential race. The Harlan Institute has begun to crowdsource FantasySCOTUS-ers’ predictions of each issue the Court has agreed to hear. Past uses of FantasySCOTUS as a sort of prediction market have yielded correct predictions in over fifty percent of cases.

Finally, the Court will hear Arizona v. United States this term, which considers the constitutionality of Arizona’s recent, controversial immigration law,  S.B. 1070. As in the healthcare cases, the outcome of this case could play a  role in many upcoming elections.

In addition to these politically sensitive cases, the Court has agreed to hear a number of First Amendment cases over the remainder of OT2011. On Tuesday, January 10th, the Court will hear argument in FCC v. Fox, to determine the constitutionality of the FCC’s “fleeting expletives” policy. That same day, the Court will consider Knox v. SEIU, which tests the constitutionality of state laws conditioning employment on the payment of union assessments used for political purposes.  Finally, in United States v. Alvarez, the Court will face the question of whether the First Amendment is consistent with the Stolen Valor Act, which makes it a crime to falsely represent receipt of military decorations or medals.

The Court has now granted certiorari in over 70 cases this Term.  If recent years provide any guidance, we can expect the pace of cert grants for this Term to slow significantly as the Court begins to issue opinions.  However, even with fewer new cases on the horizon, the next few months will have more than their share of Court excitement.

		Member	Points
1		Melech	4,340
2		tcampbell1950	4,190
3		nbcrcc	4,190
4		lawnerd	4,100
5		Jakes553	3,870
6		abbamouse	3,790
7		corteal	3,790
8		vivekn	3,620
9		TheConstitutionsChamp	3,580
10		homerthedude	3,520
11		Kanu17	3,270
12		ugapolisci	3,260
13		eodenius	3,220
14		jonathaningram	3,200
15		hummel8226	3,070
16		ctrejbal	2,970
17		hythlos	2,850
18		jtrulock	2,840
19		Alexander	2,760
20		keichstaedt	2,670
21		gomorra3	2,590
22		andrewthemachine	2,480
23		nuchar	2,250
24		shanec	2,240
25		uscterrapin	2,130

Here are the latest law school rankings:

		Member	Points
1		Melech	3,210
2		lawnerd	3,200
3		tcampbell1950	3,190
4		nbcrcc	3,130
5		Jakes553	3,060
6		abbamouse	2,990
7		corteal	2,980
8		homerthedude	2,940
9		vivekn	2,720
10		ugapolisci	2,680
11		Kanu17	2,570
12		TheConstitutionsChamp	2,550
13		jtrulock	2,470
14		jonathaningram	2,340
15		eodenius	2,320
16		Alexander	2,310
17		ctrejbal	2,310
18		hythlos	2,190
19		shanec	2,140
20		hummel8226	2,120
21		keichstaedt	2,110
22		patman000	2,070
23		gomorra3	2,070
24		uscterrapin	1,970
25		bannana873	1,940

Here are the rankings for the top 10 law schools:

Candidates selected for the Harlan Intern Program will work closely with our Board of Directors to help develop our two major initiatives, FantasySCOTUS.org and YourConstitution.net.

Please send a resume and a writing sample to info@harlaninstitute.org. If your application is selected, you will receive a brief telephone interview.

Candidate Qualifications:

The Institute is looking for candidates with an interest in the Supreme Court, the constitution, and most importantly, in liberty. Entrepreneurial spirits and out-of-the-box thinkers are ideal candidates. While our operations are headquartered in Washington, D.C., a big part of our mission is reaching out to educators across the country, so we encourage people from outside of the Washington, D.C. area to apply. As for qualifications, the Institute is looking for candidates with a variety of skills and backgrounds:

• Legal, Political Science, & Government- The Institute is looking for candidates with an interest in constitutional law, who keep abreast of current Supreme Court cases, and can explain cases in plain English
• Technology- All of the Institute’s lesson plans are driven by technology. Candidates with a background in web development (HTML, PHP, MySQL), graphic design (Photoshop, Illustrator), and a good grasp of Web 2.0 (Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, etc.) are in demand.
• Education- An important component of the Institute’s initiatives is teaching, primarily high school students. Candidates with a background in education, and those with teaching experience, are in demand
• Business- The Harlan Institute needs skilled candidates who can plan, market, and raise funds for this exciting new product to a national audience. A background in marketing, advertising, or finance can help shape the roll-out of the Institute’s products.

Responsibilities:

FantasySCOTUS.org:

• Research cert grants and cases pending before the Supreme Court for the 2010 October Term
• Summarize the cases and questions presented in plain English
• Reduce the case to one or two primary issue
• Gather all relevant precedents, statutes, and other resources
• Prepare lesson plans for teachers to use to teach case
• Formulate blog posts for each class, and scoring rubric
• Investigate Justices’ voting histories on that topic to allow students to make informed predictions
• Work on developing the league and setup for the September school year
• Integrate site with YourConstitution.net
• Develop weekly SCOTUS trivia tidbits
• Prepare other related research projects for students
• Promote and market FantasySCOTUS.org
• Develop grassroots network of teachers nationwide (e-mail, message boards, direct mail if needed)
• Reach out to home-schooling market
• Research different advertising opportunities and ways to get in classroom
• Fundraise and help develop donors for FantasySCOTUS.org and the Harlan Institute

YourConstitution.net:

• Utilize the Library of Congress and other D.C. Libraries to locate photographs and other materials dealing with the people behind famous constitutional Supreme Court cases
• Research famous Supreme Court cases, summarize them in plain English, focusing on the human element of the cases
• Obtain photographs for each of the cases
• Manage the YourConstitution.net ConWiki
• Reach out to famous constitutional litigants, through phone, e-mail, and direct mail, and schedule interviews with the Institute
• Manage copyright issues and ownership of photographs
• Communicate with historical societies, records halls, and other organizations that may have photographs
• Assist with Harlan Institute publication, Constitutional Places, Constitutional Faces
• Promote and market YourConstitution.net in various educational markets as a resource for students to learn

I am pleased to announce that FantasySCOTUS: Crowdsourcing a Prediction Market for the Supreme Court, co-authored with Adam Aft and Corey Carpenter, is on SSRN. This article analyzes the predictions made during the October 2009 Term onFantasySCOTUS.net. Based on this data, FantasySCOTUS accurately predicted a majority of the cases, and the top-ranked experts predicted over 75% of the cases correctly. Additionally, we compared our predictions to the path breaking Supreme Court Forecasting ProjectThe FantasySCOTUS top three experts not only outperformed the Forecasting Project’s experts, but they also slightly outperformed the Project’s model—75.7% compared with 75%., which developed a supercrunching algorithm to predict cases based on a certain cases characteristics. Finally, we assessed whether the Supreme Court prediction market merely mirrors the media—that is, do people make predictions based on coverage about the cases in the news and blogosphere. Using an expansive searching process—that considered both old school, and new school media—we found a correlation between media coverage and predictions.

This was a very fun paper to write, and reveals great insights about how people perceive the Court.

Here is the abstract:

Every year the Supreme Court of the United States captivates the minds and curiosity of millions of Americans—yet the inner-workings of the Court are not fully transparent. The Court, without explanation, only decides the cases it wishes. They deliberate and assign authorship in private. The Justices hear oral arguments, and without notice, issue an opinion months later. They sometimes offer enigmatic clues during oral arguments through their questions. Between arguments and the day the Court issues an opinion, the outcome of a case is essentially a mystery. Sometimes the outcome falls along predictable lines; other times the outcome is a complete surprise.

Court-watchers frequently make predictions about the cases in articles, on blogs, and elsewhere. Individually, some may be right, some may be wrong, but on the aggregate, these predictions tend to be correct. Until recently, there was not a way to pool together this collective wisdom, and generate accurate real-time predictions for all cases pending before the United States Supreme Court.

Now there is such a tool. FantasySCOTUS.net from the Harlan Institute: the Internet’s premier Supreme Court Fantasy League, and the first crowdsourced prediction market for jurisprudential speculation. During the October 2009 Supreme Court term, the 5,000 members made over 11,000 predictions for all 81 cases decided. Based on this data, FantasySCOTUS accurately predicted a majority of the cases, and the top-ranked experts predicted over 75% of the cases correctly. With this combined knowledge, we can now have a method to determine with a degree of certainty how the Justices will decide cases before they do. This essay explores the wisdom of the crowds in this prediction market and assesses the accuracy of FantasySCOTUS’ predictions

This essay presents the first detailed analysis, and comparison of this path breaking Supreme Court Forecasting Project, documented in a 2004 Columbia Law Review article. The Project developed a sophisticated algorithm and, utilizing decision-trees, predicted how the Justices would decide cases based on certain characteristics of a case—such as circuit of origin, type of case, and the political ideology of the case. To test the power of their model, the organizers of the Forecasting Project assembled a cadre of Supreme Court experts, litigators, and academics to make predictions about the same cases.

During the October 2002 Term, the Project’s model predicted 75% of the cases correctly, which was more accurate than the Forecasting Project’s experts, who only predicted 59.1% of the cases correctly. The FantasySCOTUS experts predicted 64.7% of the cases correctly, surpassing the Forecasting Project’s Experts, though the difference was not statistically significant. The Gold, Silver, and Bronze medalists in FantasySCOTUS scored staggering accuracy rates of 80%, 75% and 72% respectively (an average of 75.7%). The FantasySCOTUS top three experts not only outperformed the Forecasting Project’s experts, but they also slightly outperformed the Project’s model—75.7% compared with 75%.

Finally, this essay assesses whether a Supreme Court prediction market merely mirrors the media—that is, do people make predictions based on coverage about the cases in the news and blogosphere. To complete this assessment, we searched several sources for stories about the ten cases we considered—the ALLNEWS database on Westlaw, the Legal US News database on LexisNexis, as well as a custom Google search engine we programmed that sifts through the 2010 ABA Journal Blawg 100. Using this expansive searching process—that considered both old school, and new school media—we found a correlation between media coverage and predictions.

The inner-workings of the Supreme Court of the United States are shrouded in secrecy. From the first Monday in October to the last week in June, the Justices operate behind-the-scenes to determine some of the most important issues in our society. Now FantasySCOTUS can provide accurate, real-time predictions how the Court will decide these cases. The FantasySCOTUS crowdsourced prediction market provides an unprecedented insight into the decision-making of the United States Supreme Court.