We construct the complete network of 26,681 majority opinions written by the U.S. Supreme Court and the cases that cite them from 1791 to 2005. We describe a method for using the patterns in citations within and across cases to create importance scores that identify the most legally relevant...

Many of the Supreme Court’s most important decisions, such as those involving executive power and the constitutionality of abortion regulations, are decided by plurality decision. Plurality opinions result when five or more Justices agree on the result in a particular case but no single...

Based on well-established informational attributes of principal-agent theory, we argue that lower court treatment of existing Supreme Court precedent provides useful information regarding the actual, as opposed to expected, policy consequences of that precedent. Thus, conditional on ideological...

The calibration of probability or confidence judgments concerns the association between the judgments and some estimate of the correct probabilities of events. Researchers rely on estimates using relative frequencies computed by aggregating data over observations. We show that this approach...