“Don’t Confuse Me with the Facts”: The Use and Misuse of Social Science on the United States Supreme Court

William D. Blake

Chief Justice John Roberts evoked a collective groan from social scientists during oral arguments in the Wisconsin partisan gerrymandering case, Gill v. Whitford. He argued the plaintiffs were attempting to remove reapportionment decisions “from democracy and [were] throwing them into the courts pursuant to, and it may be simply my educational background, but I can only describe as sociological gobbledygook.” The (exasperated) plaintiff's attorney responded, “Your Honor, this is--this is not complicated.” Justice Breyer then jumped in to ask a more sympathetic question.

These interrogatories focused on the intelligibility of the efficiency gap, a mathematical formula proposed by the plaintiffs to evaluate the severity of partisan gerrymandering. If Chief Justice Roberts's characterization of the efficiency gap was accurate, one can imagine judges needing an army of research assistants furiously writing statistical code in Stata to decipher its meaning. In reality, what seemed to baffle the Chief Justice is a simple algebraic expression, invented by a political scientist that any high school freshman should be able to calculate. Earlier in oral argument, Justice Breyer had described the efficiency gap as, “not quite so complicated as the opposition makes it think.”