Nom De Plume: Who Writes the Supreme Court's "By the Court" Judgments?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For several dozen of its major decisions, the Supreme Court in recent decades has adopted an unusual judgment style—the unanimous and anonymous “By the Court” format. Unlike judgments attributed to specific justices, “By the Court” presents an unusual and impersonal institutionalist face. But what is happening behind the facade? Are these deeply collegial products with the actual drafting divided between some (or most, or all) of the justices? Is it “business as usual” which for major judgments involves rotation between the senior judges? Or is it simply a pseudonym for the Chief Justice writing alone in an unusually emphatic way? Function word analysis is used to identify most likely authors for each “By the Court” decision; this provides a basis for understanding how Supreme Court practices for these important cases are evolving, and also carries implications for the likelihood of the current practice surviving the current Chief Justiceship. Au cours des dernieres decennies, dans un grand nombre de ses arrets, la Cour supreme a adopte une methode inhabituelle de redaction—ils sont signes de maniere unanime et anonyme par « la Cour. » Contrairement aux decisions signees par des juges, les arrets signes par la Cour presentent une facade inhabituelle et impersonnelle. Mais qu’y a-t-il derriere cette facade? Ces arrets sont-ils le produit d’un travail collectif, la redaction etant confiee a certains juges ou la plupart d’entre eux? Est-ce que les juges travaillent comme ils le font habituellement, ce qui signifie que la redaction des arrets marquants est confiee a tour de role aux juges ayant le plus d’anciennete? Ou est-ce simplement un pseudonyme pour la juge en chef qui redige seule avec une empathie inhabituelle? L’analyse des mots outils, ou mots fonctionnels, est utilisee pour determiner l’identite des auteurs les plus probables de chacun des arrets rendus par la Cour. Cette analyse donne un point de depart pour comprendre comment evoluent les pratiques de la Cour supreme pour ces affaires importantes. Elle souleve aussi la possibilite que la pratique actuelle survivra au depart de l’actuelle juge en chef.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.008 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".