The Utility of Text: The Case of Amicus Briefs and the Supreme Court

TL;DR

This paper models how amici curiae craft their texts to influence Supreme Court decisions, improving vote prediction and enabling counterfactual analysis by applying a utility-maximization framework.

Contribution

It introduces a novel random utility model incorporating amici briefs to better predict Supreme Court votes and analyze their influence.

Findings

Enhanced vote prediction accuracy

Ability to perform counterfactual analysis

Demonstrated influence of amici briefs on decisions

Abstract

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.