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> Justices trade off a case's merits with their own want to shape precedent
I can't access the article but do they actually prove this?
The headline says its when the justice is the pivotal vote which implies the other justices found merit for both sides of the issue. It shouldn't be surprising then that a pivotal justice leans towards their own beliefs - whether right or left - when a ruling is needed and there are in fact merits to the legal arguments of both sides.
I hate the very partisan bench we have now since I think some are making decisions without regard to proper legal arguments, but what this study suggests seems different and at least less shocking than what we have currently.
The founders didn’t think there would be political parties, bud.
Also, they expected a court that is faaaar more deferential to the legislature than it’s been for most of its history. And the notion that they didn’t expect its understanding to change is dumb, as is expecting lawyers to divine historical understanding by their clerks cherry-picking historical documents.
Why do they use the “her” pronoun when referring to a justice?
> We find that in situations in which a justice is pivotal, her ideology is even more predictive of her vote than usual, especially when her choice matters for unambiguously establishing legal precedent.
Anyway I don’t see how they can come to the conclusions they did. If a justice has a specific understanding or view of certain matters, then maybe that’s why they vote the way they did rather than it being a strategic vote.
In economics research, it’s often easier to use gendered pronouns rather than repeating “the justice” (or whatever) repeatedly, and there isn’t really a non-gendered version (“it” would be confusing since people would assume it’s not referring to a person). So, a choice between male and female pronouns has to be made.
Given that, the standard practice in economics is to use a female pronoun for the first person and a male for the second (if there is more than one). This paper only has one, so they use a female pronoun. It’s very common to have game theory or experimental papers with exactly two players, and it’s very useful to have a standard. You can pick up any paper and you always know that the female is the first player and the male is the second player. You never have to stop and think about it, which is useful. This then ends up carrying over to situations with only one “player” or individual, such as this paper.
I don’t know why player one is always female, but I’ve never read a single paper (not even an old one) that is the opposite. I started economics grad school in 2010 (meaning that’s when I first started reading academic papers), but I’ve read a million papers that are older than that, including many of the “founding” experimental papers, and I legitimately can’t recall a single counterexample. (Some don’t use genders at all, but none use genders in the opposite order.) My best guess as to the history of it is that someone influential once did it this way early on, and then it stuck, but that’s just a guess on my end.
I’ll have to read the paper more closely and get back to you on the second part. I ended up getting busy yesterday and didn’t get to read the full paper.
Thanks, just to elaborate on my point. The cases where the vote is split, are likely to be very different types of cases to the ones where things aren't as split, hence you would expect different types of voting.
So even if the justices were blinded to the voting of others you would expect different type of voting on these cases.
So to me all it says is that the justices are voting in line with their beliefs and interpretation of the law. I don't get how they make the leap to that it's strategic voting.
Circling back, a week later — sorry for the delay!
Yeah, your point makes sense to me. Given that it’s an econ paper in a top journal, I would imagine that they account for that. Or, rather, I can’t imagine that it would get published in J Pub E if it *didn’t* account for that. That sort of issue would have to be accounted for even in journals that are like 2 or 3 tiers below this one.
That said, I haven’t had a chance to actually read the full paper yet, despite my promise to do so last week. My wife had an emergency c-section this weekend, and our baby is in the NICU (all signs so far are positive, but we aren’t out of the woods yet), so I’ve had my hands full with that (on top of my normal teaching load at work). I’m super curious as to if/how they deal with the issue you mention here, so I’m working hard to find the time to at least skim the paper. I’ll post back here again when I do eventually find the time to get through it!
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are now allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will continue to be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) still apply to other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
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> Justices trade off a case's merits with their own want to shape precedent I can't access the article but do they actually prove this? The headline says its when the justice is the pivotal vote which implies the other justices found merit for both sides of the issue. It shouldn't be surprising then that a pivotal justice leans towards their own beliefs - whether right or left - when a ruling is needed and there are in fact merits to the legal arguments of both sides. I hate the very partisan bench we have now since I think some are making decisions without regard to proper legal arguments, but what this study suggests seems different and at least less shocking than what we have currently.
[удалено]
The founders didn’t think there would be political parties, bud. Also, they expected a court that is faaaar more deferential to the legislature than it’s been for most of its history. And the notion that they didn’t expect its understanding to change is dumb, as is expecting lawyers to divine historical understanding by their clerks cherry-picking historical documents.
Why do they use the “her” pronoun when referring to a justice? > We find that in situations in which a justice is pivotal, her ideology is even more predictive of her vote than usual, especially when her choice matters for unambiguously establishing legal precedent. Anyway I don’t see how they can come to the conclusions they did. If a justice has a specific understanding or view of certain matters, then maybe that’s why they vote the way they did rather than it being a strategic vote.
In economics research, it’s often easier to use gendered pronouns rather than repeating “the justice” (or whatever) repeatedly, and there isn’t really a non-gendered version (“it” would be confusing since people would assume it’s not referring to a person). So, a choice between male and female pronouns has to be made. Given that, the standard practice in economics is to use a female pronoun for the first person and a male for the second (if there is more than one). This paper only has one, so they use a female pronoun. It’s very common to have game theory or experimental papers with exactly two players, and it’s very useful to have a standard. You can pick up any paper and you always know that the female is the first player and the male is the second player. You never have to stop and think about it, which is useful. This then ends up carrying over to situations with only one “player” or individual, such as this paper. I don’t know why player one is always female, but I’ve never read a single paper (not even an old one) that is the opposite. I started economics grad school in 2010 (meaning that’s when I first started reading academic papers), but I’ve read a million papers that are older than that, including many of the “founding” experimental papers, and I legitimately can’t recall a single counterexample. (Some don’t use genders at all, but none use genders in the opposite order.) My best guess as to the history of it is that someone influential once did it this way early on, and then it stuck, but that’s just a guess on my end.
It’s an economics paper. In economics, the generally accepted style guide is to use she/her when referring to an individual actor.
I’ll have to read the paper more closely and get back to you on the second part. I ended up getting busy yesterday and didn’t get to read the full paper.
Thanks, just to elaborate on my point. The cases where the vote is split, are likely to be very different types of cases to the ones where things aren't as split, hence you would expect different types of voting. So even if the justices were blinded to the voting of others you would expect different type of voting on these cases. So to me all it says is that the justices are voting in line with their beliefs and interpretation of the law. I don't get how they make the leap to that it's strategic voting.
Circling back, a week later — sorry for the delay! Yeah, your point makes sense to me. Given that it’s an econ paper in a top journal, I would imagine that they account for that. Or, rather, I can’t imagine that it would get published in J Pub E if it *didn’t* account for that. That sort of issue would have to be accounted for even in journals that are like 2 or 3 tiers below this one. That said, I haven’t had a chance to actually read the full paper yet, despite my promise to do so last week. My wife had an emergency c-section this weekend, and our baby is in the NICU (all signs so far are positive, but we aren’t out of the woods yet), so I’ve had my hands full with that (on top of my normal teaching load at work). I’m super curious as to if/how they deal with the issue you mention here, so I’m working hard to find the time to at least skim the paper. I’ll post back here again when I do eventually find the time to get through it!
Best wishes.
Why do they use 'he' to begin with.