new score = -1/(raw score)

would achieve the communicative goal of aligning higher activism with bigger absolute (and positive) magnitude, and wouldn’t need updating even if by some quirk we got some very activist judges someday.

Given that your current scores range from -0.0365 to -0.3516, the new scores would range from 2.844 (for Wilkinson) to 27.397 (for Posner) (NB: no percent signs).

Oops. Thanks for catching that. I have corrected the chart. I was using a positive value scale until I presented at Law and Society and most people agreed it made more sense for the scale to be negative. I forgot to change my average number to a negative number.

Hi A.J.,

The differential was described in a previous post in my series. It is the differential between reversal rates in cases using a deferential and non-deferential standard of review. You are right that it is not the best way to communicate the data. Eventually, I will scale all of the scores (probably between 0 and 100). However, until I have data from all of the circuits, I cannot construct a complete scale since I don’t know the highest and lowest score yet. Since this is just my preliminary data, I decided to use my raw scores.

Corey

Although I assume the way the scale is defined may make mathematical sense, it is not at all an intuitive communication tool. The direction of absolute infinite increase is in the direction of less activism, though obviously there must be a zero point to activism. Similarly, one might expect that activism is relatively unbounded in theory (e.g., a judge might be an anarchist), yet the more activist scores seem to converge to zero. Probably you can fix this by a simple mathematical manipulation of the definition of your score, such as adding an absolute number to all scores, inverting a proportion, etc. It would be good to have a bigger absolute value indicate more activism.

The caption of your chart is a little confusing. In the text, you say “my average activism score is -10.40%.” And the scores are all negative percentages. But your caption says “Activism Differential (10.40% average).” The positive percentage in the caption is confusing. I think this should read “Activism Differential (-10.40% average.)”

Thanks!