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| 1 | +# Prediction reasoning — scotus/1001152 / evt-petition-disposition |
| 2 | + |
| 3 | +## The legal question |
| 4 | + |
| 5 | +The event `evt-petition-disposition` (kind: `petition`, decision target: |
| 6 | +`disposition`) asks how the Supreme Court of the United States will dispose of a |
| 7 | +petition for a writ of certiorari in *Roberts v. United States*. "Granted" here |
| 8 | +means the Court grants the petition (grants certiorari, i.e. agrees to review the |
| 9 | +case); "denied" means it declines review. |
| 10 | + |
| 11 | +## Governing standard |
| 12 | + |
| 13 | +Certiorari is wholly discretionary. Under Supreme Court Rule 10, review "is not a |
| 14 | +matter of right, but of judicial discretion," and is granted "only for compelling |
| 15 | +reasons" — typically a genuine, entrenched conflict among the courts of appeals |
| 16 | +or state courts of last resort, or an important unsettled question of federal |
| 17 | +law. The overwhelming default disposition of a cert petition is **denial**: |
| 18 | +across recent Terms the Court receives on the order of 7,000–8,000 petitions and |
| 19 | +grants roughly 1–2% of them. The grant rate is far lower still for petitions |
| 20 | +filed *in forma pauperis* (the unpaid docket), which are granted only a fraction |
| 21 | +of one percent of the time. |
| 22 | + |
| 23 | +## Facts from the snapshot that drive the outcome |
| 24 | + |
| 25 | +Predicting only from the latest snapshot |
| 26 | +(`record/snapshots/2026-06-28.json`): |
| 27 | + |
| 28 | +- **Court / posture.** `court_id` is `scotus`; the originating court is the U.S. |
| 29 | + Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (`original_court_info`). So this is a |
| 30 | + cert petition seeking review of a Fourth Circuit judgment. |
| 31 | +- **Docket number `01-7733`.** This is an October Term 2001 number, and the high |
| 32 | + four-digit serial (`7733`) is characteristic of the Court's *in forma pauperis* |
| 33 | + / pro se docket rather than the paid docket (paid cases carry much lower |
| 34 | + serials). IFP petitions have the lowest grant rate of any category. |
| 35 | +- **No signals of a grant.** The snapshot shows `date_cert_granted: null`, |
| 36 | + `date_argued: null`, and `date_reargued: null`. There is no argument date, no |
| 37 | + panel, and no assigned Justice — none of the indicia that accompany a granted, |
| 38 | + argued case. |
| 39 | +- **No merits-stage activity.** `docket_entries` is empty, `date_terminated` is |
| 40 | + null, and there is no nature-of-suit or cause recorded. Nothing in the |
| 41 | + point-in-time record suggests the case advanced to plenary review. |
| 42 | +- A `clusters` reference is present, but I do not fetch its contents: that would |
| 43 | + be acquiring a new case fact beyond the snapshot, which the predictor contract |
| 44 | + forbids. (For SCOTUS, an opinion cluster can attach to an ordinary order-list |
| 45 | + denial as readily as to a merits decision, so its mere presence is not |
| 46 | + probative of a grant.) |
| 47 | + |
| 48 | +## Reasoning behind the probability |
| 49 | + |
| 50 | +The base rate for a SCOTUS cert petition is denial, and every case-specific |
| 51 | +signal available in the snapshot points the same way: an IFP/pro-se-style docket |
| 52 | +number, no argument or grant date, no panel, and no merits activity. None of the |
| 53 | +"compelling reasons" indicia under Rule 10 are visible in the record I am |
| 54 | +permitted to use. I therefore predict **denied**. |
| 55 | + |
| 56 | +I set `probability` (P(granted)) at **0.02** — slightly above the raw IFP grant |
| 57 | +rate to leave room for the residual uncertainty inherent in reasoning from a thin |
| 58 | +snapshot, but firmly on the denial side. `granted = 0`, |
| 59 | +`predicted_disposition = "denied"`, with `confidence = 0.85`. |
| 60 | + |
| 61 | +No per-judge votes are predicted: cert denials are typically unsigned order-list |
| 62 | +dispositions with no recorded vote breakdown, and the snapshot names no Justices, |
| 63 | +so `votes` is empty. |
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