07/19/2016
Few experts in the United States are better than Timothy Delaune at guessing how the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court will decide cases.
By “few,” we mean 14.
Delaune, a SUNY Cortland assistant professor of political science, placed 15th in the nation at an online game on that subject called FantasySCOTUS — Supreme Court of the United States. It was the second consecutive year that he placed in the top 1 percent of all aspiring SCOTUS experts.
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In FantasySCOTUS, players predict in advance how the SCOTUS — an old telegraph acronym now commonly used as a shorthand reference by political insiders — will decide lower court rulings, and whether each appeals court case will be affirmed or overturned.
“I’m definitely getting better, and it was in a year that was significantly complicated by the death of a justice mid-term,” said Delaune, a constitutional law specialist who serves as SUNY Cortland’s pre-law advisor and moot court coach. Justice Antonin Scalia, the court’s strongest conservative voice, died unexpectedly in February.
Delaune edged up from the 18th spot in predictions related to the prior year’s Supreme Court term to number 15 in this term, which ran from October 2015 to the end of June. The field of competitors included more than 5,800 people.
The game is an attempt by political science researchers to refine a computer program aimed at predicting the outcome of Supreme Court cases. Sponsored by Thomson Reuters, the competition is run by LexPredict, which uses algorithms to forecast the famously secretive body’s actions.
Since 2009, the company has offered attorneys, law students and other followers of the Supreme Court the opportunity to give it their best shot at guessing the overall outcomes as well as the votes of each justice in cases pending before the court.
Participation is free and contenders can earn cash prizes of up to $10,000 for correctly analyzing Supreme Court outcomes based on their observations and understanding of the cases, views of the justices and substantive federal and constitutional law.
It’s only Delaune’s second year competing at FantasySCOTUS. He was about 79 percent correct overall in predicting the votes of individual justices. Delaune accurately guessed every vote that Justice Scalia cast before his death and was roughly 84 percent spot on for the votes of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — Scalia’s liberal, political opposite. His overall accuracy rate on court decisions was 83 percent.
“Last year, when I won the 18th spot I received a $100 gift certificate,” said Delaune. “This year they cut back on the prize a bit. I needed to get in the top nine or 10 spot to get anything valuable. But I do suppose I have bragging rights for having cast all of Justice Scalia’s votes correctly before his passing.”
A graduate of Georgetown University, Delaune has a law degree from University of Chicago, a master’s degree from Tufts University and a doctorate from University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He practiced as an attorney in Concord, N.H., and Boston, Mass., for six years. His research interests are law and political theory. He currently is writing articles about Justice Clarence Thomas’s conception of dignity and the constitutionality of the Presidential Succession Act.
For FantasySCOTUS, Delaune said he sifts through past voting patterns, judicial philosophies, questions at oral arguments and other expressed views of the justices to arrive at logical conclusions.
Justice Scalia’s untimely death may have simplified this year’s predictions, Delaune said.
“Initially it was my reaction that it would complicate cases, but in some ways it created a built-in advantage,” Delaune said. “When the Supreme Court ties in an opinion, then the judgment of the lower court stands as it is. But that tie in the lower court’s opinion only stands in that part of the country.”
When there is a 4-4 tie, the justices don’t issue an opinion or publicize votes of the individual justices. So for the FantasySCOTUS competitors, no action is required.
One notable example was the Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association case, which was of great interest to campuses because they involved the fee public sector labor unions charge to members and non-members alike.
“Had Scalia lived to decide that case, there’s really no doubt in my mind, or really in most observers’ minds that public mandatory fees would have been struck down,” Delaune said. “Because Scalia died, that was a four-to-four tie.” The deadlocked case was ruled in favor of the labor unions.
“That was an important case, but perhaps not as important was others the court did figure out how to decide,” he said. “The justices really did go out of their way to try not to have the result of a tie in especially important cases.”
This also was not possible in a whole suite of cases surrounding the issue of birth control coverage under Obamacare, Delaune noted. “They tried to sketch out a compromise, then sent it back to the lower courts without a decision because it was clear they were going to tie four-to-four. So that was basically a “no decision,” but with strong encouragement from the Supreme Court for the lower court to try to address it, to reach a compromise.”
In terms of individual cases, the professor performed especially well on analyzing the court’s direction in the Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt case, involving abortion rights in Texas. On June 27, the court ruled 5-to-3 that the state can’t place restrictions on the delivery of abortion services that create an undue burden for women seeking an abortion.
“I got all the justices exactly right on that,” Delaune said.
He also correctly figured out where the justices would fall on a raft of decisions that turned on whether police in certain states could legally demand a breathalyzer test based on a traffic infraction stop. Law enforcement officers in North Dakota, Montana and Minnesota had laws on the books allowing them to jail a suspect for refusing the test without showing a warrant first.
“The answer is the police can’t draw blood from you without a warrant, whether they are pulling you over at roadside or taking you back to the station,” Delaune said. “But if the state wants to pass a law, the police can demand to administer a Breathalyzer test for a roadside traffic stop, because that is not considered too invasive. … It’s still going to vary state by state. That case was kind of a big deal.”
Most cases Delaune correctly predicted aren’t big deals, at least to ordinary people.
“I tend to be a little bit better at the very important cases or the very unimportant cases,” Delaune said.
Naturally, Delaune uses his pastime to keep on top of current rulings for the sake of students in his Constitutional Law I and II classes.
“I’ll be weaving all these in some lectures and discussions where I’ll tell my class that there are some changes in the law because the court made some decisions in this last term,” he said.