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"A Mathematician Crunches the Supreme Court's Numbers," by Nicholas Wade. The New York Times, 24 June 2003.
This article summarizes Dr. Lawrence Sirovich's article "A pattern analysis of the second Rehnquist U.S. Supreme Court," which appeared in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Sirovich used information theory and singular decomposition theory to analyze nearly 500 final opinions since 1995 (since the panel has remained stable), and concludes that the voting pattern "shows that the court acts as if composed of 4.68 ideal justices" and "the decision space of the Rehnquist court requires only two dimensions for its description." He determined that 4.68 ideal justices would have produced the same diversity of decision making. (Sirovich defines "ideal justice" as one whose voting is uncorrelated with any other's, but concedes that before final votes the justices do file opinions and dissents and do cooperate.) Wade reports that "although [Sirovich's] refusal to draw any political implications from his analysis may disappoint some people, the neutrality of the approach is what makes it appealing to political and legal scholars." Sirovich is in the department of biomathematical sciences at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and introduced the technique used in face recognition systems.
In addition, NPR's Scott Simon, host of Weekend Edition, interviewed Keith Devlin on the topic "The Mathematically Perfect Court," on June 28, 2003.
See also:
"Why Those Opinions Don't Add Up," by Jocelyn Selim. Discover, October 2003.
"Supreme Court Independence, by the Numbers," by Tom Gugliotta. Washington Post, 28 July 2003, page A7.
"Ideal Justice," by Erica Klarreich. Science News, 28 June 2003, page 405.
--- Annette Emerson
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