WASHINGTON — The football players at Calvin Coolidge Senior High School, Mayor Adrian Fenty and a room full of cheering staff needed only one word to describe her: coach.

Natalie Randolph, a 29-year-old biology and environmental science…

Ed. note: ATL has teamed up with the 10th Justice to predict how the Supreme Court may decide upcoming cases. CNN has called FantasySCOTUS the “hottest new fantasy-league game.”

In order to assess the accuracy of our league, we will revisit five recent opinions, and compare the predicted outcomes with the actual outcomes. We have selected cases that did not necessarily fall along ideological lines to test the capability of our league to detect nuance in judgments. In this week’s 10th Justice, we will take a look at Hemi Group, Briscoe, Powell, Hertz Corp, and Shatzer, all of which were decided at the end of January and February. We also consider how cheating impacted the results.

For each case, we have recorded our outcome statistics and SMRs (standard majority ratio). The SMR provides a method to test whether or not users perceive the Court as dominated by conservative ideology.

In Hemi Group v. City of New York, the Supreme Court reversed the 2nd Circuit’s decision that the non-payment of taxes was an injury flowing from a third party’s actions for the purpose of the RICO Act. Overall, only 39% of total predictions found that the Supreme Court would reverse, and the confidence interval was 10.25% (at the 95% level), indicating that the results were a decently accurate representation of predictions about the case (and their general incorrectness). As for the specific split, 18 users guessed that the outcome would have less than 9 Justices voting. These members were astute, as Sotomayor recusing herself from an opinion involving the Second Circuit should have been expected. But only half of those predictions, 10% of total predictions, were reverse predictions. No member correctly predicted the votes of each Justice. The SMRs indicate that most predictions were counting on liberal Justices joining the majority, since Stevens, Ginsburg, and Breyer all have SMRs above one at a statistically significant level. Of course, this could also be representative of a complex case or issue, as Kennedy was in the minority for this case. This fact would also explain how the majority of predictions got the general outcome wrong.

In Briscoe v. Virginia, the Supreme Court reversed the Virginia Supreme Court’s. The Court held that a Defendant does not waive his 6th Amendment rights to the confrontation of forensic analysts who prepared forensic evident used in court by failing to call them as witnesses. 63% of predictions correctly guessed that the Supreme Court would reverse. The results were statistically significant at a 99% confidence level, with a confidence interval of 11.86. For the specific split, only 3 users, 4.6% of total predictions, predicted a unanimous outcome. These members probably correctly assumed a per curiam reversal would be issued in light of Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts. The SMRs further support this conclusion since the “liberal minority” all had SMRs above 1 at a statistically significant level. Sotomayor’s SMR of 2.17 indicated that she was highly likely to join in a majority decisions, and Ginsburg’s SMR of 1.71 was also a solid indicator. Overall, it is interesting to note that while predictions produced a statistically sound correct outcome, a smaller proportion of users predicted the correct split than in Hemi.

In Florida v. Powell, the Court reversed a Florida Supreme Court decision that held that informing a defendant that they had a right to “talk to an attorney” was insufficient to inform them they had a right to have counsel present. Overall, 51% of members predicted that the Court would reverse, but with such a tight margin, the results were not statistically significant. Only three users, approximately 2% of total predictions, predicted the correct split, while only one user predicted the correct votes. In conjunction with the indeterminate nature of the general outcome predictions, the SMRs did not reveal any additional information since all Justices had SMRs that were not significantly different from 1. This indicates that predictions mainly sorted along ideological lines.

But how did the FantasySCOTUS cheaters affect the results? This installment of the 10th Justice continues at JoshBlackman.com, after the jump.

Supreme Court – United States – Government – Law – Judicial Branch

By Michael J.W. StickingsJust one recommendation today, a piece from Monday that I’ve been meaning to highlight here.********** Slate: “Why Has a Divided America Taken Gay Rights Seriously?” by Dahlia Lithwick, reviewing University of Chicago philosoph…

Thompson’s research suggests that our thinking is actually enhanced by the sort of rumination that occurs with depression, and that while depression can turn destructive, it originally had an adaptive role.

SANTA ANA, Calif. — A California man was charged Monday with operating a ring of illegal test-takers who helped dozens of Middle Eastern nationals obtain U.S. student visas by passing various proficiency and college-placement exams for t…

* Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II tells the state’s public colleges and universities that it’s okay to discriminate against LGBT people? [Washington Post]

* New York doesn’t know what to do with its bad kids… [New York Times]

* … While a Georgia judge has to step down for throwing a party for them. [WSB Radio]

* Switzerland wrote the “dignity” of plant life into its constitution and made a law last year to protect the rights of goldfish and canaries, but Swiss voters stopped short at the idea of appointing lawyers for animals at taxpayers’ expense. [Telegraph]

* Is patent law on the rise? [San Francisco Chronicle]

* Presidential impersonators from SNLs past visit Barack Obama in a dream to give him advice on financial reform, thanks to a collaboration between Ron Howard and Harvard Law professor and Congressional Oversight Panel chair Elizabeth Warren. The Funny or Die video is embedded after the jump. Dana Carvey is amazing. [New York Times]

* “Are you or have you ever been a lawyer?” [New York Times]

* Google’s top lawyer made over $2 million last year, but he’s still a wanted man in Italy. [ABA Journal]

* Kick-off today in Minnesota Vikings vs. the NFL. [Stamford Advocate]

Barack Obama – President – United States – Will Ferrell – Dana Carvey

RICHMOND — Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II has urged the state’s public colleges and universities to rescind policies that ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, arguing in a letter sent to each school that their b…

It’s tax season now, the season when CPAs work 70 hour weeks. But not this year. Not only do job agencies like Robert Half have no accounting jobs, they tell me companies are laying off accountants now, during tax season. This is unprecedented.
This is a previously unexamined leading indicator. How cheery will the economic [...]

In the past eight years, the United States has allocated $51 billion to rebuild and stabilize Afghanistan. But tracking that money sometimes seems as challenging as finding the leaders of the Taliban.
No one keeps an exact count of the number …

We must insist that coalfield communities get their fair share of clean energy jobs, and clean energy investments, not just the crumbs. Committing to a coal free future begins in the coalfields.

WASHINGTON — Two thousand federal transportation workers will be furloughed without pay on Monday, and the Obama administration said they have a Kentucky senator to blame for it.

Federal reimbursements to states for highway programs wil…

ST. PAUL, Minn. — It was 5 p.m. in the lobby of the library of Metropolitan State University, and Clara Ware was sitting behind a table covered with pens, notepads and buttons with the Census 2010 logo, calling out like a sideshow barker…

Rising Road is one of those books that happened by accident; a chance occurrence on the way to somewhere else.

After the outcome of the election in 2004, when the country was abuzz with reports of how the question of gay marriage drove President George W. Bush’s supporters from their homes to the voting booths, I began to think about law and marriage, and the way of constitutional change.

It was a topic of great personal importance to me, law and marriage. Had my parents been swayed by the marriage laws that were still in place in various states at the time of my birth, I would never have been born. Neither would any of my five brothers or sisters. It was the era of the anti-miscegenation laws. The simple act of having us was a crime, a number of states declared, and they backed the ban up with the criminal sanction. Defiant mixed race couples could be jailed.

I was nearly seven-years-old by the time the U.S. Supreme Court finally got around to striking those laws down. Seems my siblings and I weren’t crimes after all. It was the law that was wrong, the Court announced in Loving v. Virginia in 1967. The decision was unanimous. Even Justice Hugo Black agreed, though a son of the South, the region of the country most steadfastly devoted to the anti-miscegenation regime.

After the election in 2004, I wondered how constitutional change like that came about-how acts of intimacy, and marriage, and the wee beings that can result from them, could one day be outlawed, and another day not. I will write an article about that, I thought to myself, and set to work.

When doing the researching for that intended article, however, the unexpected happened. I tripped over a reference to a 1921 trial in Birmingham, Alabama. A murder trial, where the marriage of the daughter of a Methodist minister to a Catholic migrant from Puerto Rico, led the minister to kill the Catholic priest who took their vows. How horrible, I thought. I’ll use it as an example in my article.

read more

By Capt. FoggGiving birth to a disabled child is God’s way of punishing women for having had a prior abortion, says Virginia Representative Bob Marshall, R-13th:In the Old Testament, the first born of every being, animal and man, was dedicated to th…