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IU McKinney Professor Nicholas Georgakopoulos and Professor Frank Sullivan have published a book that examines closely divided supreme court decisions. Titled Five-Four: Dissecting Supreme Court Tightly Split Decisions, the book develops new techniques to see the work of supreme courts, characterized by much greater complexity than that either seen by the usual lawyer’s focus on one topic’s current law or media focus on left versus right.

Five-Four demonstrates that over time, multiple coalitions produce tightly split decisions. To illustrate graphically the way in which these coalitions form, the authors arrange in circles the majority coalitions that issue tightly split decisions, and the swing votes between the different majorities; and then annotate the graph with the decisions those majorities issue, divided between conservative and liberal. These circular graphs constitute a rich and entirely new way of visualizing Supreme Court voting behavior.

By analyzing the vast complexity of judging using new techniques of simple quantification and visualization, this book makes a contribution to understanding how supreme courts work. The authors believe that there is more work to be done in this regard and hope that readers will find more patterns to explore using techniques such as those developed in this work.

Professor Georgakopoulos is the Harold R. Woodard Professor of Law at IU McKinney. He produces scholarship in the intersection of business and uncertainty. He is the author of The Logic of Securities Law, Principles and Methods of Law and Economics, a coauthor of the multi-volume Blumberg on Corporate Groups, and numerous articles that have received broad citation, including previous opinions by the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Professor Frank Sullivan, Jr., is Professor of Practice and an Indiana University Bicentennial Professor at IU McKinney. He joined the law school after serving for 19 years as a justice of the Indiana Supreme Court. At the law school, he teaches five business and commercial law courses and a sixth course based on his judging experience.

In the photo from left are Professor Sullivan and Professor Georgakopoulos in the Reading Room at the Ruth Lilly Law Library at IU McKinney.