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Successful attempts to predict judges' votes shed light into how legal decisions are made and, ultimately, into the behavior and evolution of the judiciary. Here, we investigate to what extent it is possible to make predictions of a…
While the U.S. Supreme Court is commonly viewed as comprising a liberal bloc and a conservative bloc, with a possible swing vote or median justice between them, surprisingly many case decisions are not explained by this simple model. We…
The US Supreme Court throughout the 20th century has been characterized as being divided between liberals and conservatives, suggesting that justices with similar ideologies would have voted similarly had they overlapped in tenure. What if…
We study the obstacle problem associated with the American chooser option. The obstacle is given by the maximum of an American call option and an American put option, which, in turn, can be expressed as the maximum of the solutions to the…
As the most public component of the Supreme Court's decision-making process, oral argument receives an out-sized share of attention in the popular media. Despite its prominence, however, the basic function and operation of oral argument as…
While there has been a flurry of research in algorithmic fairness, what is less recognized is that modern antidiscrimination law may prohibit the adoption of such techniques. We make three contributions. First, we discuss how such…
As Large Language Models (LLMs) are proposed as legal decision assistants, and even first-instance decision-makers, across a range of judicial and administrative contexts, it becomes essential to explore how they answer legal questions, and…
Predictive algorithms inform consequential decisions in settings with selective labels: outcomes are observed only for units selected by past decision makers. This creates an identification problem under unobserved confounding -- when…
Unaided human decision making appears to systematically violate consistency constraints imposed by normative theories; these biases in turn appear to justify the application of formal decision-analytic models. It is argued that both claims…
The law forbids discrimination. But the ambiguity of human decision-making often makes it extraordinarily hard for the legal system to know whether anyone has actually discriminated. To understand how algorithms affect discrimination, we…
Predictive models are being increasingly used to support consequential decision making at the individual level in contexts such as pretrial bail and loan approval. As a result, there is increasing social and legal pressure to provide…
The paper offers a contribution to the interdisciplinary constructs of analyzing fairness issues in automatic algorithmic decisions. Section 1 shows that technical choices in supervised learning have social implications that need to be…
In computational social choice, the distortion of a voting rule quantifies the degree to which the rule overcomes limited preference information to select a socially desirable outcome. This concept has been investigated extensively, but…
This work contributes to a foundational question in economic theory: how do individual-level cognitive biases interact with collective choice mechanisms? We study a setting where voters hold intrinsic preference rankings over a set of…
Now almost three decades since its seminal Chevron decision, the Supreme Court has yet to articulate how that case's doctrine of deference to agency statutory interpretations relates to one of the most compelling federalism issues of our…
Computer-aided decision making--where a human decision-maker is aided by a computational classifier in making a decision--is becoming increasingly prevalent. For instance, judges in at least nine states make use of algorithmic tools meant…
Companies that try to address inequality in employment face a hiring paradox. Failing to address workforce imbalance can result in legal sanctions and scrutiny, but proactive measures to address these issues might result in the same legal…
Law enforcement acquires costly evidence with the aim of securing the conviction of a defendant, who is convicted if a decision-maker's belief exceeds a certain threshold. Either law enforcement or the decision-maker is biased and is…
Various structured argumentation frameworks utilize preferences as part of their standard inference procedure to enable reasoning with preferences. In this paper, we consider an inverse of the standard reasoning problem, seeking to identify…
We survey the design of elections that are resilient to attempted interference by third parties. For example, suppose votes have been cast in an election between two candidates, and then each vote is randomly changed with a small…