Congratulations to Brady Kelly, Back-to-Back Chief Justice of FantasySCOTUS for OT 2022 and 2023

The October 2023 Term of FantasySCOTUS finally came to a close. This term, Chief Justice Roberts cemented himself as the Court’s center, as Justice Barrett continues to separate herself from the other Trump appointees. On the whole, this term was more predictable than some recent years. And the FantasySCOTUS prediction market did quite well. In the aggregate, our crowd predicted 83.05% of the cases accurately, up from 75% last term, and 81% the term before.

I am happy to announce that the Chief Justice is Brady Kelly. Brady has now won the competition two years in a row. Players receive ten points for each correct prediction of a Justice’s vote. We recorded 59 merits cases (DIGs do not count). A perfect score would have been 5,900 points. Brady scored 4,950 points. Bill Corteal, who was the champion in OT 2021, was the runner-up with 4,750 points.

Here is the Top 10:

I profiled Brady last year in this post. This year, I asked him to provide some more detail on how he makes predictions. Here are his comments:

This term, I changed approaches and put in a prediction for every case prior to oral arguments. I changed as needed after oral arguments, but I appreciated A) being able to form an opinion prior to seeing potentially misleading headlines, and B) the ability to (separately) hold myself accountable to predictions without the benefit of oral arguments. Interestingly, Justice Gorsuch had my least accurate predictions pre-oral arguments and my most accurate ones post-oral arguments. In terms of the most difficult cases, I found FBI v. Fikre challenging, and found Moore v. U.S. the hardest to wrap my head around. But honestly, I’m just glad there wasn’t another habeas corpus case. There were a few cases where I guessed the outcome about right but guessed incorrectly how it would be counted (e.g. Devillier v. Texas), and then others where I didn’t think it was terribly difficult but nonetheless got it very very wrong (e.g. Snyder v. U.S.). I felt the easiest three to predict were NRA v. Vullo, LePage Bakeries, and Sheetz (at least the QP itself). It seems like there are some really difficult questions waiting to come up in a future Sheetz-type case.

Congratulations to Brady, and everyone else who participated. The 16th season of FantasySCOTUS will launch on the first Monday in October.

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