More network analysis of the courts

Stan Wasserman (yes, that Stan Wasserman), writing in the online journal Centrality, describes a project that he's been working on with Doug Steinley (U Missouri) to analyze the Rehnquist Court as an affiliation network.

"Each case is an affiliation variable, containing recorded information on which justice voted in the affirmative. So, if there have been 100 cases decided in a given year, the data array consists of a 9 by 100 two-dimensional matrix which gives all the affirmative votes, case-by-case, on each and every case."

Wasserman hopes to use this data to identify stable "liaisons" between justices.