SOSC 1375 Lecture 7: lecture 2
14 Jan 2019
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Supreme court has huge responsibility there decisions effect billions of people and can cost billions of dollars. Only way to get answer by understanding what data says. Unfortunately report by propublica reports that the justices struggle with that exact task. Propublica reports that the court cited faulty research and introduced its own errors in nearly a third of the 24 cases that relied on such facts. Example: shelby county v holder invalided a critical portion of the voting rights act of 1965. Justice john: roberts jr. , argued that the south has taken great strides that made the protections of the act unnecessary. However the senate judiciary committee analysis misinterpreted how the census bureau reports race and ethnicity data and wrongly suggested that registration gaps between minorities and whites had shrunk significantly, an error that neither he nor his clerks caught. In short they wanted to make a decision with bad intel and bad facts that were inaccurate.
