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I felt kind of annoyed by the claim that "most" Supreme Court cases go 6-3 along ideological lines, although I guess the more defensible version would be that the controversial cases all go 6-3 along ideological lines. Be that as it may, I created a website this morning to help understand data from the most recent term. Spent more time than I intended on this so I'm hoping someone else finds it interesting: https://wbruntra.github.io/scotus/?tab=dashboard
Legalytics/Empirical SCOTUS also does a lot of really awesome work: here although they actually post often enough that some of the stuff like you describe sometimes gets buried
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In my opinion the true blackpill for the anti-immigration hardliners is the bipartisan refusal by the government to actually enforce E-Verify, which quite literally is already on the books (relatedly the floated exception for illegal immigrants employed in agriculture and hospitality). A crackdown on illegal immigration which refuses to penalize employers for hiring illegal immigrants is a completely unserious attempt at a crackdown. The administration seems to be optimizing for flashy headline-grabbing deportation raids while avoiding anything that might actually disrupt the status quo.
The CEO of Glenn Valley Foods was shocked to find ICE carting away a dozen of his workers even though he participated fully in E-Verify.
From the point of view of an employer, I dunno what to tell him. If we want employers to be part of an enforcement system, we need to have some assurance that if they do the work, it will actually result in not hiring ineligible workers. This is a guy that provides significant training and value to employees -- the exact kind of person we want to incentivize to hire legals. Instead he's going back and using the same E-Verify system that sucks in the first place.
It seems like "e-verify" is just filing a simplified form I-9 (which has a field for social security number/A-number/passport number) online, and then getting a result saying that "records match" from the SSA or DHS. On Form I-9, the employee attests under penalty of perjury that they have the right to work until some date, and provides IDs to back up that claim. The employer attests under penalty of perjury that they have verified the worker's official documents which establish identity and employment authorization. This is already required for all employers. I imagine a ton of employers are not actually verifying documents and perjuring themselves, but nobody cares, because it is employers who sponsor political candidates.
According to USCIS, E-verify is different from Form I-9 in that it requires a social security number and photo identity documents, and tells the employer whether the employee is eligible to work within three to five seconds. Watching one of their tutorials for employers, the employer fills out "Name", "Date of Birth", "Social Security Number", "Employee's email address", "Citizenship status", and which documents the employee provided. (With the exception of the email address, this all duplicates information on the I-9). The employer is then prompted to upload scans of the documents provided.
So how does the program not work? How does an employer who uses it end up hiring ineligible workers? News outlets are saying that the Glenn Valley Foods CEO "explained that federal officials said his company was a victim of unauthorized workers using stolen identities or fake IDs to get around the E-Verify system."
We have a couple options here. None of them leave the employer, the immigrant, or DHS/SSA/USCIS looking very good:
Employees were signing up to work with scans of other people's documents. Literal identity theft, and the employer didn't catch it because they aren't actually comparing the photo on the ID to the physical person at the worksite (as they are testifying they did under penalty of perjury). This probably shows up as tax fraud later, too.
It's all a performative show. There is no photo recognition on the back end, or USCIS is failing to actually assess eligibility to work. Perhaps people on refugee status with scheduled court dates are automatically waived through. This one is on the US government.
"Photo ID" is not what you think. Form I-9 instructions and E-verify instructions both link a list of "Documents that establish identity," List B from Form I-9. These include a "school ID card with photograph" or, for minors, a "school record or report card". I can't imagine that a "school ID" is a challenging document to fake, given the number and variety of schools of higher education (includes tech schools!) around the country and how there are no standards for what constitutes a school ID. (Not to mention the number of minors who are able to buy alcohol in the US.) I also can't imagine a "report card" incorporating a photo ID, and again, they are printed by every school in the nation, and nowadays report cards are probably html files which can be modified by anyone with technical savvy before being printed off at home. So potentially all that an immigrant has to do is claim to be an under-18 refugee or college student, provide a fake ID or report card, and they can pass document inspections at a lower level of scrutiny. Again, literal identity theft, with the US government complicit. The employer must be wondering how 30% of their balding day laborers are children and students.
I think it is likely that the answer is (2). The reason this business was raided was because DHS already knew there were a bunch of people working there who didn't have the right to work. Perhaps they were previously permitted to work, and perhaps the Biden admin was letting anyone work.
In summary, I am appalled by the low standards of quality the US holds itself to for ID verification (one can also use a student ID to vote!), and I think it's possible anyone involved - immigrant, employer, or government - could be telling "motivated truths".
Fully agree with all this, except I'd kinda put more (relative) on 1/3. In particular, there's studies that untrained individuals are not great at matching photos to people, especially grainy ones and many of them were using stolen identities of people vaguely co-ethnic to them.
Another take on the conclusion is that there is no actual system in place for verifying someone's identity in a way that works when applied by clueless or look-the-other-way very-mildly-complicit employers.
One of my coworkers suggested the simplest way would be that when you start work and do the I9 process, the government goes back and verifies with you via an independent means.
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As someone out of US trying to understand why is it that difficult to implement a work right verification system when every other developed country have one:
Isn't this the standard for everyother first world countries?
The US has long been a little weird about ID.
The right was always worried about a communist takeover of the federal government and wanted to make sure they could disappear and live under fake names without too much skill needed. I'm using communist loosely, there are a lot of possible left authoritarian governments that people on the right would feel the need to hide from.
The left really did have a bunch of radicals living under fake names. Some for longer than you'd think -- Sara Jane Olson of the Symbionese Liberation Army wasn't caught until 1999.
After 2001 there was a lot of interest in tightening things up, but by that point there were a lot of illegal immigrants, and neither party really wanted to shake things up too much.
So the US government is a lot worse at identifying individuals than you'd expect. Systems are designed not to work with each other or report obvious problems. The IRS goes as far as setting up their computer systems to allow for people filing taxes with stolen SSNs.
I don't know specifics about e-verify, but I've heard it was mostly designed around making congress look like it's doing something.
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I think the problem, as usual, is diversity; the US has a large ethnic underclass that thinks it's fucking normal to go around without an ID, and has no idea where their birth certificate is, if it even still exists. You can't enforce "papers, please!" on illegal Hispanic without enforcing it on urban blacks, and they would fail just as often despite having every legal right to live and work here, leading to much wailing and gnashing of teeth; see the kerfuffle about needing an ID to vote.
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One faction (my faction, I suppose to acknowledge my obvious bias) of the anti-immigration camp is that while the {parole-in-place, resettlement, credible-fear and temporary protected status, etc...} are a small proportion of numbers but a huge proportion of problematic and highly net-negative immigrants as compared to the Sergeys and Elons of the world. You could call them selectivists but really it's absurd to thing that we even need to characterized "we don't need 100K Haitians" as selectivity.
I expect that when the anti-immigration camp was totally out of the zeitgeist in the preceding decade they didn't have to reconcile what they really meant because there was a strong external enemy and they were out of power anyway. Now the farmworker thing has crystalized the division and someone is going to have to mediate it.
It was easy to be against the Obama/Biden policies, it's harder to find one that satisfies the entire coalition.
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This is fairly impressive. Did you make this with assistance of generative AI?
Personally, I'd like a greater breakdown into those controversial and high-impact (landmark) cases, but it's still interesting to know that almost half of all SCOTUS opinions are 9-0.
I know what you mean. Any suggestions on how to break down the data this way? I mean, at some point, if you just define important cases as cases that go 6-3 along ideological lines, then by the way that you've defined it, 100% of important cases are going to be decided along ideological lines. I'm trying to think about what would be a good middle ground that's still data analysis-based while giving insight into these potentially controversial cases.
On the Agreement Matrix tab, I've added a checkbox that excludes unanimous cases from the analysis. Which I think is an interesting way to look at it, because you're seeing that if there's any disagreement at all in a case, then, for example, Thomas and Jackson are most likely to find themselves on opposite sides, while Thomas and Alito are most likely to be on the same side. You didn't really need data analysis to come up with this insight, but I guess it's good to confirm at least that data analysis confirms what everybody knows.
https://wbruntra.github.io/scotus/?tab=matrix
For identifying landmark cases: Number of times that the data has been looked up? Number of contributions on relevant Wikipedia page?
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I believe 9 0 is the most common result from all the cases no one hears about.
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Oh, very much so. Github Copilot + Claude Sonnet 4, if you care to know. Technically I am a web developer but at this point I am basically all-in on using AI wherever possible. Nice to get done in a couple hours what would have taken me much, much longer, and much more frustration, using the old method of typing code by hand.
In same way I hate using AI (vibe coding), but this seems to be the exact case where AI coding is suitable: one off project and not business critical
Although I think using AI for a prolonged period will lower your overall ability to code as a developer, or maybe I am just too old school with basically little to no IDE in my frequently used tools
This strongly depends on what your ability to code was before you started using AI. The reality is a lot of people can make websites now despite not having a professional approach to coding. If you're a classically trained developer, computer scientist, and you only use Vim, then yeah, you're probably right. That set of developers is going to be a smaller and smaller proportion of the total as time goes by.
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I really wish I could see in AI what other people do; I recently tried to use Cursor at the recommendation of a senior developer, and I found that it was actively trying to force me down the wrong path when I was coding (I had to write a one-off web page that was compatible with some very ancient technology, and it kept trying to suggest CSS rules and autofilling text that made no sense for the use case). This has been a very consistent experience for me whenever I try to use AI for literally anything.
It's possible that I'm just not very good at prompting it, but I find that every time I start relying on it for anything, it is subtly wrong in ways that are frustrating to track down and repair.
On the one hand, I'm sure you're right that it's not as good as a human developer. On the other hand, it's kind of like the web in general. Websites all kind of suck now because React gives developers the ability to be lazy and not worry about resource usage or anything else because everything's kind of "good enough." But the cost and speed advantage of using AI is so overwhelming that I don't think your concerns are going to hold up. Developers are just going to have to add more bad code on top of bad code until it works.
Full disclosure: I really think that a lot of concerns from sophisticated developers about how AI makes mistakes are just snobbery/posing. But that's what I, an unsophisticated developer, would think, right?
Like, I'm not saying I've never had an experience where AI is going down a path that I think is bad and needs to change course. But in those cases, I usually hit the stop button and say, "Hey, I think you need to do this in a totally different way," or I can just say, "Hey, your last change was terrible. Can you just revert it?" There are a few instances where I feel kind of dumb because I'm using three prompts to say like hey I need you to change the font size, when I probably could've done it more easily myself in that specific case. But overall, I'd rather be talking to my agent than looking at code.
What type of developer are you if you'd rather be talking than coding? /s
More seriously, the situations I find AI is really useful is when I need some information, but have enough knowledge to fine tune it after the fact. I've tried to use it to write code, and it always produces code that is kind of messy and bad. I asked it to produce some builder interfaces from a set of DTO interfaces, and it would do weird things like put in defaults that I didn't intend, or return the wrong field occasionally*. What worried me about it is that the junior developer I was working with at the time was copy-pasting them into the codebase as is, and didn't have any comprehension about why they wouldn't work.
*For reference, the type of implementation I was talking about would be something like:
interface IAddress { function line1() : string; function line2() : ?string; function city() : string; function province() : ?IProvince; function country() : ICountry; function zipCode() : IZipCode; }
interface IAddressBuilder { function setLine1( string $line1 ) : static; function setLine2( ?string $line2 ) : static; // you get the picture }
It would give me something like:
interface IAddressBuilder { function setLine1( string $line1 ) : static; function setLine2( string $line2 = '' ) : static; function setLCountry( ICountry $country ) : static; function setProvince( string $province ) : static; }
Which was just not very useful.
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I would think that as a matter of law, most SC cases are at least somewhat controversial.
Per WP:
They are obviously not going to pick a lot of the clear-cut cases where the circuit courts are all in agreement about what the law is and the SCOTUS would concur. They will likely prefer cases which allow them to steer things more than saying "every court is doing fine, keep doing what you are doing".
From your neat dashboard, it seems like only 16 out of 62 cases are affirmations (which I understand to mean "there was nothing substantial wrong with the lower courts judgement"). This would be a scandalously high rate of reversal, except in the context that for 99% of cases, the lower courts judgement stands because the SC does not grant the petition for cert.
Of course, while e.g. the major questions doctrine may be controversial legally, it is not one of the big battlegrounds of the culture war, which tends to be focused more on the object level. I can totally buy that the 6-3 split is common for CW cases.
It would be interesting to establish a metric how CW a case is. Perhaps the amount of discussion it generates on social media within 48h of publication might be a decent proxy. Or one could arbitrary define and case related to gun rights, abortion, minority/LGBT rights, immigration as CW and everything else as non-CW.
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You might be interested in SCOTUSBlog's stat pack for the current term. They also have ones for some historical terms.
Thanks! My inability to find such a summary was what caused me to embark upon this folly.
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