How AI can help predict the voting behavior of Supreme Court justices

The lifetime tenure of each of the U.S. Supreme Court’s nine justices means they have long-lasting influences on the country’s affairs. How a justice votes in a case is a reflection of his or her judicial temperament, personal philosophy and political ideology.

Political scientists, lawyers, constitutional scholars and laymen alike closely watch the court. They often attempt to divine what happens during the justices' secret deliberation sessions and during the process of drafting the opinions that will ultimately be released to the public.

As public attention focuses on the court in the wake of the February death of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, we at the Discovery Analytics Center at Virginia Tech offer a way for artificial intelligence to provide some insight. In a recently published paper, we propose a way to model the Supreme Court using computer-based machine learning. Read more...