U.S. Supreme Court justices and other federal judges are, effectively, appointed for life, with no built-in check on their cognitive functioning as they approach old age. There is about a century of research on aging and intelligence that shows the vulnerability of processing speed, fluid reasoning, visual-spatial processing, and working memory to…

A mom walks up to the District Attorney's desk in the Justice of the Peace Court with a total of six tickets as a result of her low-income children's truancy, three in her name and one for each of her three children. She faces the possibility of having to pay anywhere from $510 to $2010 in court costs and fines. Luckily for this mother, her…

W. A. Wallis studied vacancies in the US Supreme Court over a 96-year period (1837-1932) and found that the distribution of the number of vacancies per year could be characterized by a Poisson model. This note updates this classic study.

Existing methods for the analysis of ordinal-level data arising from judge ratings, such as the Multi-Facet Rasch model (MFRM, or the so-called Facets model) have been widely used in assessment in order to render fair examinee ability estimates in situations where the judges vary in their behavior or severity. However, this model makes certain…

We derive an analytic model of the inter-judge correlation as a function of five underlying parameters. Inter-cue correlation and the number of cues capture our assumptions about the environment, while differentiations between cues, the weights attached to the cues, and (un)reliability describe assumptions about the judges. We study the relative…

It is known that the Rasch model is a special two-level hierarchical generalized linear model (HGLM). This article demonstrates that the many-faceted Rasch model (MFRM) is also a special case of the two-level HGLM, with a random intercept representing examinee ability on a test, and fixed effects for the test items, judges, and possibly other…

Laws and guidelines regulating legal decision making are often imposed without taking the cognitive processes of the legal decision maker into account. In the case of sentencing, this raises the question of whether the sentencing decisions of prosecutors and judges are consistent with legal policy. Especially in handling low-level crimes, legal…

Identifies the purpose of academic debate (to teach students argumentative skills) and the characteristics that a debate paradigm must have to fulfill that purpose. Takes a functional view of the debate judge as one who judges argumentative practices, not one who decides policy issues as would a real-world decision maker. (PD)

Discusses how paradigms, such as "tabula rasa," reduce the judge's influence as a critic. Suggests alternatives. (PD)

Contends that, while "tabula rasa" has produced improvements in academic debate, it also has encouraged harmful practices. Proposes limitations and draws implications for a more general dialectical approach to argument evaluation. (PD)

Debate judge philosophy statements have been part of the Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) National Debate Tournament since the tournament's inception. Judges are asked to identify their preferred debate paradigm in the statement. The practice has raised the question of whether debate critics understand the debate paradigms as they are…

A study reported on two experiments which addressed the question of whether debate judges do as they say they will with regard to the advent of judge philosophy statements. The larger goal of the combined experiments was to discover whether: (1) judging paradigms operate meaningfully in Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) debate and (2)…

Explores some of the arguments that are popularly lodged against the use of counterplans in modern academic debate. Suggests that most of this criticism is not persuasive due to fundamental problems with the implicit views of the debate process and the role of the judge in that process. (MS)

Offers a critique of the narrative perspective as it relates to the National Debate Tournament (NDT) and suggests that an alternative "expert" model would better satisfy the goals of the activity while simultaneously remedying the primary shortcomings of NDT debate. (MS)

A proportional reduction in loss (PRL) measure for reliability of categorical data is explored for the situation in which each of "N" judges assigns a subject to one of "K" categories. Calculating a lower bound for reliability under more general conditions than had been proposed is demonstrated. (SLD)