The Utility of Text: The Case of Amicus Briefs and the Supreme Court
This work addresses the challenge of understanding judicial decision-making for political scientists and legal scholars, but it is incremental as it builds on existing quantitative frameworks.
The authors tackled the problem of modeling Supreme Court decisions by incorporating amicus brief texts into a random utility model, resulting in improved vote prediction and enabling counterfactual analysis.
We explore the idea that authoring a piece of text is an act of maximizing one's expected utility. To make this idea concrete, we consider the societally important decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States. Extensive past work in quantitative political science provides a framework for empirically modeling the decisions of justices and how they relate to text. We incorporate into such a model texts authored by amici curiae ("friends of the court" separate from the litigants) who seek to weigh in on the decision, then explicitly model their goals in a random utility model. We demonstrate the benefits of this approach in improved vote prediction and the ability to perform counterfactual analysis.