
Show HN: ScotusWars – see your state's win rate in state vs. state court cases - lordgilman
https://scotuswars.gilslotd.com/
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JackC
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/](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](https://case.law/exhibits/cite-grid)

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6gvONxR4sf7o
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.

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IncRnd
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.

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arcticbull
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

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IncRnd
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?

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

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IncRnd
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.

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

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Enginerrrd
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.

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throwaway0a5e
>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.

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

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

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lordgilman
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.

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koolba
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?

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chrismorgan
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).

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

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crossman
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.

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schoen
Like "MIT Wins the Harvard-Yale Game"!

[https://www.espn.com/college-
football/story/_/id/25276347/be...](https://www.espn.com/college-
football/story/_/id/25276347/best-college-football-prank-harvard-yale-mit-
balloon)

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preommr
What's with Oklahoma and Texas?

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totalZero
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_River_Bridge_War)

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Shared404
I don't know what Iowa has been doing, but they seem... problematic based on
this.

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schoen
Apart from the "spicy" case identified elsewhere in the thread
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23760678](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.

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Shared404
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.

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

