The wisdom of the crowd, or something else maybe? Susan Mangiero has a wonderful post on something that I probably should have known existed, but did not: an internet site where lawyers and other voyeurs vote on the outcome of pending Supreme Court cases. As Susan notes, the site includes a prediction on a key ERISA case, Fifth Third Bancorp v. Dudenhoeffer, pending before the Supreme Court. It will be interesting to see whether the wisdom of the crowd can accurately predict the outcome of that case.

But there might be a more interesting question to explore, which stems from William Buckley’s famous line that he would rather be governed by the first 100 people in the phone book than the faculty of Harvard. If the Supreme Court rules in a case like Fifth Third Bancorp to the opposite of that predicted in advance by the crowd, the more interesting question may not concern the accuracy of the crowd’s prediction, but instead who reached the better result: the crowd or the Court? I will tell you what. After the Court issues its decision in Fifth Third Bancorp, if the crowd came down on the other side, I will write a blog post on which one I thought was right: the stand-in for the faculty of Harvard (i.e., the sitting justices) or the stand-in for the first hundred folks in the phone book (i.e. the voting public).