Simple predictor of supreme court cases: which side is asked more questions

There could be a simpler explanation: the Justices are asking the side which is inherently unlikely to win more questions because they have a greater need to justify their case. If you're arguing what is likely to win by the logic of the status quo or dominant paradigm, there's almost no need to state your case - the Justices will already know the logic and arguments behind your case. If you're fighting from the opposite side, there are a lot more questions, clarifications, etc. that need to be made to understand your position. And you're still likely to lose even if you've made a good case because you have the inherently weaker case.

Basically, what I'm arguing, is that the Justices generally know the arguments for the stronger case and so there isn't a lot of questions to be asked, but want to give the weaker case an opportunity to make their case and prove that they, in fact, have a stronger case. However, it's unlikely coming from the weaker side that you'll have the stronger case in the end.

Correlation doesn't imply causation! This newspaper article seems to take this simple observation and twist it into "don't let the judges ask you questions". As far as I can tell, there's no evidence for this causal relationship.

interesting stat. But calling it a predictor may be a stretch as it does little to help either side make decisions as to how far to push a case. Once your making oral arguments in front of the highest court, there is little room left for such a stat to be useful.

Interesting. So the more you can affirm the views of the judges, the more likely you are to win. If you pique the interest or curiosity of the judges, the more likely you are to lose. That's disturbing. To me that's the stance the least likely to get at the truth.

I wonder if there's a highly intelligent and advanced alien civilization out there that would view our adversarial judicial system a mere refinement on "trial by combat."

I wonder what this kind of analysis will find if applied to the high courts of other countries. Of course, we'll need to control for how the high court judges are installed in the different countries. Could make for a very interesting comparison.