I’m not in a position to check whether Alexander Prakash’s study was well executed, but it does look well conceived. Prakash took a publicly available data set (measuring how much Justices talk during oral argument) and used it to test two hypotheses: 1) Justices talk more during high-profile cases, maybe because they like public attention; and 2) they talk more during closely divided cases, maybe because they seek to influence each other. Prakash finds the evidence consistent with 2) but not 1), and incidentally notes that there do not appear to be systematic differences in speaking time based on left-right orientation or gender (h/t Adrian Vermeule on Twitter).
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