Learning Policy Levers: Toward Automated Policy Classification Using Judicial Corpora

Abstract

To build inputs for end-to-end machine learning estimates of the causal impacts of law, we consider the problem of automatically classifying cases by their policy impact. We propose and implement a semi-supervised multi-class learning model, with the training set being a hand-coded dataset of thousands of cases in over 20 politically salient policy topics. Using opinion text features as a set of predictors, our model can classify labeled cases by topic correctly 91% of the time. We then take the model to the broader set of unlabeled cases and show that it can identify new groups of cases by shared policy impact.