Show HN: ScotusWars – see your state's win rate in state vs. state court cases | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: ScotusWars – see your state's win rate in state vs. state court cases

scotuswars.gilslotd.com

107 pointslordgilman29 comments

Cool! If the OP or anyone wants to try this across all US caselaw (as opposed to just Supreme Court) we recently released a data set of citation data at the Caselaw Access Project:

https://case.law/download/citation_graph/

I used that data to build a visualization of how often states cite each other, for example:

https://case.law/exhibits/cite-grid

I can't exactly put my reasoning to words, but it's really nice to see a map of the U.S. include the territories as well as the states.

Of course, clicking on DC gives "United States" rather than the District of Columbia.

It's inclusivity and correctness, both admirable qualities.

It's interesting the only case the territories have been involved with was a singular one against Iowa of all states, which Puerto Rico won. It's a bit of a spicy one too, involving extradition and civil war law.

https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/111940/puerto-rico-v-b...

U.S. is an abreviation for United States. I'd say it makes more sense not to have territories than it does to include them in a list of states.

USA is an abbreviation for United States of America, and frankly, many of the territories aren't even in the Americas so, it makes more sense not to have them in the first place.

Kidding, because what you name something doesn't really matter nearly as much as what it actually is :P

I agree! That's my point :-). Why, in a nation that was founded on freedom and then states' rights, have a territory that cannot vote nationally or participate fully with the nation?

Or how can a nation created on the principle of self-determination declare itself indivisible?

That's from the pledge of allegiance, which was started by a socialist, Francis Bellamy. The PoA does not talk about self-determination in any way whatsoever and is not a foundational document or principle of the USA.

Interesting, not sure this tells you much of anything but it is visually interesting.

Yeah, instead of interstate conflicts, it might be more interesting to just visualize win/loss rates for cases originating in a particular state. They probably would all come out neutral, but if not, that might tell you which states are most likely to run afoul of the constitution.

>but if not, that might tell you which states are most likely to run afoul of the constitution.

Not necessarily. SCOTUS tends to let things simmer until there's disagreement among the states and then deliver a big smack-down that affects many more states than just where the case originated.

Seems to not show the whole truth for multi-state cases.

Ex: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/147530/alabama-v-north... just shows as AL v. NC, but it's actually Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, Virginia and an interstate commission vs North Carolina.

I'm sort of at the mercy of the WUSTL database, they only give one state for respondent and petitioner. I caught a few more cases with regex, but in the case of this one where the name of the case has only two states I didn't catch it.

Where it says et al, that means "and others".

State Of Alabama, Et Al., Plaintiffs v. State Of North Carolina., 560 U.S. 330 (2010)

Is there a similar breakdown by federal circuit, judge, and the President that appointed them?

Alternatively, anybody know a source for that type of raw data in a machine readable format?

This has severe accessibility issues which are fortunately fairly easily remedied. The short explanation of the problem: users of screen readers and others like them will be unable to use this at all.

Your map is essentially an imagemap, implemented with SVG rather than a raster image and <map>. But this draws attention to two important things about imagemaps that aren’t implemented: indication of what you’re hovering on, and keyboard accessibility.

With an imagemap, each area is a link, so at the very least you’ll see the href in the status bar of your browser in desktop browsers; and you can do better by adding a tooltip with the title attribute.

The HTML title attribute translates to the SVG <title> element, which should be the first child of the element it applies to:

  <path …>
    <title>…</title>
  </path>

Secondly, each state needs to be focusable so that keyboard users and screen readers can click on them.

One way of doing that is to just slap tabindex="0" on each path, and slap a keydown handler on it to detect Enter. That’s an improvement and would make it tolerably accessible, but it’s not the best solution.

The best solution is to make each state actually a link. Wrap each <path> element with <a xlink:href="…"> (remember this is the SVG anchor element, not the HTML one, hence xlink:href. On the latest browsers you can use href instead, but Safari has only supported this for 16 months and Firefox for three years, so xlink:href is safest).

The eventual markup should be something like this:

  <svg>
    <a xlink:href="#AK">
      <title>Alaska</title>
      <path d="…"/>
    </a>
    <a xlink:href="#CA">
      <title>California</title>
      <path d="…"/>
    </a>
    …
  </svg>

And then start actually using the fragment for routing. This has the additional benefit of allowing sharing more precise links. The fragment used for routing should probably not match real document IDs, or else the document would be inclined to scroll underneath you; or else you could use a real one and just negate that. But if the link target is not a real element, add a link click handler that focuses the infobox, so that screen readers get pushed to the right place rather than remaining in the middle of the map.

Probably best also to order the paths alphabetically so that screen reader and keyboard users go through them in order.

Consider adding :focus and :hover styling too (e.g. change stroke colour, increase stroke-width, adjust fill-opacity, add a filter that tweaks the colour).

It seems there's an error when you click on MA

I stumbled on that one and thought "Man, I really don't understand law. In Massachussets v NY cases PA won?"

A new player has entered the fight apparently.

Like "MIT Wins the Harvard-Yale Game"!

https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/25276347/be...

Thanks, this has been fixed.

What's with Oklahoma and Texas?

They've had all sorts of disputes through the years. Even sent some Oklahoma National Guard and Texas Rangers to the Red River in a dust-up over a bridge once.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_River_Bridge_War

All of the trees in Texas lean north because Oklahoma sucks? College joke

Looks like border disputes. Seems strange, as there's a river that acts as the border. I'd have assumed that the middle of the river is where the border lives, but from a cursory reading of some of the cases 'where the river begins' seems to be an odd definition using "where vegetation begins" type of language.

I don't know what Iowa has been doing, but they seem... problematic based on this.

Apart from the "spicy" case identified elsewhere in the thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23760678, it looks like all of this is litigation against the neighboring states about boundary determinations, all of which Iowa lost.

It looks like the reason Iowa got involved in so much boundary litigation is that its western boundary is determined by the Missouri River (and its tributary, the Big Sioux River), while its eastern boundary is determined by the Mississippi River. Both of these rivers move around quite a bit and also are big rivers with complex courses that are hard to survey, especially with 1800s technology. So it seems like the Iowa government felt that the surveyors and Special Masters appointed to interpret the boundary had gotten it wrong with respect to the river courses, and wanted to challenge those determinations repeatedly, but never successfully.

That makes quite a lot of sense.

Thank you for the explanation, I tried reading one or two of the cases and got put off by legalese.

click on DC and you'll see that the house has a higher chance of winning

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