Who really wrote Martin v. Hunter's Lessee?: Applying a machine learning ensemble to uncover a Chief Justice's unethical behavior
Abstract
This article applies multiple machine learning methods to strongly suggest that Chief Justice John Marshall behaved unethically in an important 19th Century case of American constitutional law: Martin v. Hunter's Lessee. He wrote large swathes of the opinion even though he had a large financial stake in the outcome of the case and even though he had formally recused himself. We establish this through multiple machine learning methods, including a character-sequence-to-image method known as the frequency chaos game representation (FCGR), sentence embeddings using BERT, and the reknowned Delta method involving bags of words. All these methods of stylometry reach the same conclusions.
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Index Terms
- Who really wrote Martin v. Hunter's Lessee?: Applying a machine learning ensemble to uncover a Chief Justice's unethical behavior
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June 2023
499 pages
ISBN:9798400701979
DOI:10.1145/3594536
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Published: 07 September 2023
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