Over at the Social Science Statistics Blog Jim Greiner helpfully reminds us about the salience of precedent for those endeavoring to model court decisions. Jim notes (here):
"It's tempting to think that one can code appellate decisions or judicial opinions pursuant to some neutral criteria, then look for trends, tease out inferences of causation, etc. Here's a note of caution: they're not i.i.d. They're probably not i.i.d. given X (whatever X is). Precedent matters."
Well, that begs the question doesn't it? Shouldn't we be testing whether, how, and when precedent matters?
Posted by: frank cross | 21 March 2007 at 09:52 AM