I just ran across this old classic from Crooked Timber while cleaning old files from my hard drive and I thought some of you might enjoy seeing it (again):
Some fascinating new evidence on US Supreme Court decision making and (perhaps) on Bush v. Gore from my colleagues Forrest Maltzman, Lee Sigelman and Paul Wahlbeck in the latest issue of PS (the complete paper is here). They've uncovered smoking-gun quality evidence that Justice Rehnquist has been running a betting pool on US presidential elections - there's a copy of the bets (and results) for the 1992 election among Harry Blackmun's papers (you can see an extract below). In 1992, six members of the Court anted up $1 each for each of the 50 states and for the District of Columbia. Thus, there was a pool of $6 for each state, which was divvied up evenly among those Justices who correctly predicted the winner for that state. As the Chief Justice described the results of the pool in his cover note:
The net result is that Sandra has won $18.30, Harry has won $1.70, John and I have lost $6.30, Tony has lost $2.30, and Clarence has lost $5.10.
Read the rest here