The Chief Justice's Bad Math

My new column on The Hill posted this morning. Here is the gist:

The Hill

Chief Justice Roberts's bad math

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has a math problem. In his recently issued Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary, the chief made a basic mistake that would be obvious to anyone who encounters simple math concepts – ratios, proportions, averages – in their work or pastimes, including sports fans, teachers, fulfillment center operators, bakers, mechanics, even lawyers and many others. Roberts’s miscalculation matters because it downplays an ethics problem among federal judges, as I will explain below. 

The Journal’s comprehensive review of dockets discovered that 131 U.S. judges participated in at least 685 cases where they were clearly disqualified under the law during the period 2010-2018.

According to Roberts, “the 685 instances identified amount to a very small fraction—less than three hundredths of one percent—of the 2.5 million civil cases filed in the district courts in the nine years included in the study. That’s a 99.97% compliance rate.”

That was bad math, resulting in an overstated compliance figure, because it used the wrong denominator.

The total number of civil cases over nine years is completely irrelevant to the calculation of a “compliance rate” because there was never any reason for recusal in the overwhelming majority of those matters (either because the judge owned no stocks or because there were no corporate parties involved).

My understanding is that the researchers looked at 80,000–100,000 cases from which they identified the 685 recusal violations. The true rate of noncompliance is thus somewhere between .7 and .85 percent. That may not seem like a lot, but it is roughly triple the mortality rate from COVID-19 in the U.S., and about 25 times greater than Roberts’s own estimate of recusal failures. 

There is more to it, including his famous reference to statistical evidence as "sociological gobbledygook," and you can read the entire essay here.

Comments

[anon]

Of course, we could never notice when a Justice, in the midst of oral argument on a matter of national importance, grossly misstates the facts and promulgates disinformation about the COVID risk.
Instead, we must forever strain out gnat to disparage only those we despise for their political affiliation.