Supreme Court Decisions

About: Supreme Court Decisions is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1804 publications have been published within this topic receiving 17066 citations.

Legal abortions in the United States since the 1973 Supreme Court decisions.

Abstract: A study on legal abortion in the U.S. during 1973 and the 1st quarter of 1974 revealed the following facts: 1) the number of abortions reported has risen every year since states began relaxing their abortion laws 2) the legal abortion plateau has not yet been reached 3) changes in the distribution of legal abortions following the Supreme Court decisions of 1973 varied according to whether a state previously had a liberal or conservative abortion policy 4) 90% of the increase in abortions between the 1st quarter of 1973 and the 1st quarter of 1974 took place in nonhospital abortion clinics and 5) public hospitals have been slowest of all medical facilities to respond to the 1973 Supreme Court decision. The methodology and data analysis of the study are discussed. Specific reference is made to variations among the different sections of the country changes in the pattern of abortion delivery the extent to which the Supreme Court decisions are being implemented and the way in which different types of health institutions are responding to the new situation relative to abortion.

The Interdependence of Science and Law

Abstract: The practice of science depends upon sound law, and vice versa The law must seek decisions that fall within the boundaries of scientifically sound decisions and approximately reflect the scientific state of the art One means for this is the use of court-appointed scientific experts in technical cases to assist judges in gleaning unbiased information and determining the validity of scientific evidence

Predicting Decisions of the Philippine Supreme Court Using Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning

Abstract: For the past decades, Philippine courts have been experiencing severe court congestion and case backlog problems. This study aims to provide a solution to alleviate these problems by predicting the outcome of court cases. As the Philippine Supreme Court case decisions are the only readily available data online, we use this as our dataset. We use Natural Language Processing, particularly the bag-of-words model to represent the case text into n-grams. Spectral clustering is also used to group these n-grams into topics. These n-gram and topic features are then input to the machine learning algorithms such as linear support vector machines and random forest classifiers. Linear support vector machine results reached 45% on the n-gram datasets and 55% on the topic datasets. The best result we obtained is 59% on the topic datasets using a random forest classifier. This is the first systematic study in predicting Philippine Supreme Court decisions based purely on textual content.

Surveying Difficult Populations: Lessons Learned from a National Survey of State Trial Court Judges*

Abstract: Surveying trial court judges presents a variety of serious challenges, but recent Supreme Court decisions and the use of increasingly complex scientific evidence in trials make it necessary to assess trial judges’ knowledge and views of scientific evidence. In this article, we describe a successful nationwide survey of state trial court judges. Response rates were high, and the information obtained was valuable. Rigorous attention to detail and to proper methodology at every step is important; i.e., knowledge of the topic being investigated and the respondents’ circumstances; creation and assessment of questionnaires; construction and assessment of the codebook; training and assessment of interviewers and coders; creation of analysis plans; and flexibility. This kind of care of is costly and effortful, but it can make the difference between a successful survey and a waste of time and money. There are many compelling reasons to study the judiciary. However, judges are often perceived by researchers and those who fund research as difficult to study. Reasons for this perception of difficulty probably include the high status and professional remoteness of the judiciary in American society, judicial time constraints, assumed resentment or unwillingness to be tested, concerns by judges about confidentiality of responses, and perhaps a distrust, dislike, or perceived irrelevance of social and behavioral science and scientists. 1 The perception that judges are difficult to study can have negative consequences

Measuring the Significance of U.S. Supreme Court Decisions

Abstract: Despite general agreement that Supreme Court decisions are not fungible, no significance variable satisfactory to the judicial behavior subfield has been produced. In this study the concepts of political, legal, and historical significance are differentiated, and a political significance variable is created by factor analyzing the case choices of 15 authorities. The methods conventionally used to identify significant cases are evaluated by comparing their results to the list of politically significant cases generated here. The descriptive value of the new measure lies in finding the proportion of significant cases by term and identifying their opinion authors and its predictive value in the replication and revision of models and propositions explaining judicial behavior.