Updating a Classic: "The Poisson Distribution and the Supreme Court" Revisited

Authors: 
Julio H. Cole
Type: 
Journal Article
Volume: 
32(3)
Pages: 
Online
Year: 
2010
Publisher: 
Teaching Statistics
URL: 
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9639.2009.00386.x/abstract
Abstract: 

W.A. Wallis studied vacancies in the US Supreme Court over a 96-year period (1837-1932) and found that the distribution of the number of vacancies per year could be characterized by a Poisson model. This note updates this classic study.

The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education