The Utility of Text: The Case of Amicus Briefs and the Supreme Court
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.
PDF AbstractTasks
Datasets
Add Datasets
introduced or used in this paper
Results from the Paper
Submit
results from this paper
to get state-of-the-art GitHub badges and help the
community compare results to other papers.
Methods
No methods listed for this paper. Add
relevant methods here
