Re: Math & Court rulings

From: Karen Rand Smigrodzki (karen@smigrodzki.org)
Date: Tue Jul 01 2003 - 22:04:46 MDT

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    >
    > --- Karen Rand Smigrodzki <karen@smigrodzki.org> wrote:
    > >
    > > Any of you mathophiles read the June 24th issue of the Proceedings of
    > > the National Academy of Sciences? An article by Lawrence Sirovich
    > > entitled "A pattern analysis of the second Rehnquist US Supreme
    > > Court" concludes that our Supreme Court behaves as if it were made
    > > up of 4.68 "ideal" justices;
    > > that is, they rule as if they were completely independent. Sirovich
    > > uses the Shannon measure of information content.
    > >
    > > I think the abstract is viewable at www.pnas.org for free.
    >
    > Does this mean that so long as there are more than 4.5 ideal justices
    > that individual liberties are increasing??? If not, what DOES it mean?
    >

               No, it doesn't mean that. It doesn't indicate anything of the
    political nature of the court. A quick reading (but a lack of complete
    comprehension of the mathematical parts) leads only to a less than
    surprising conclusion that the Court is less likely to vote along strict
    "liberal v. conservative" axes than is Congress. "From the perspective of
    information theory, there is much less 'novelty' in the outcome of a
    congressional vote than in a Supreme Court decision. ... The notion of
    novelty should be balanced by the observation that nine monkeys, trained to
    flip coins, would render decisions on this basis having the highest
    novelty." page7436 of Lawrence Sirovich's paper in PNAS June 24, 2003 vol
    100 no 13.

    --karen



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