» At the Supreme Court, the side that gets more questions loses
Adam Liptak looks at a surprisingly accurate way to predict which side is going to win a Supreme Court case:
A few years ago, a second-year law student at Georgetown unlocked the secret to predicting which side would win a case in the Supreme Court based on how the argument went. Her theory has been tested and endorsed by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and has been confirmed by elaborate studies from teams of professors.
“The bottom line, as simple as it sounds,” said the student, Sarah Levien Shullman, who is now a litigation associate at a law firm in Florida, “is that the party that gets the most questions is likely to lose.”
Chief Justice Roberts heard about Ms. Shullman’s study while he was a federal appeals court judge, and he decided to test its conclusion for himself. So he picked 14 cases each from the terms that started in October 1980 and October 2003, and he started counting.
“The most-asked-question ‘rule’ predicted the winner — or more accurately, the loser — in 24 of those 28 cases, an 86 percent prediction rate,” he told the Supreme Court Historical Society in 2004.
May 26, 2009, 9:05pm Comments
