Samuel Alito's "reversal rate" revealed: 100%

[AlexanderProgressive]

Rachel Maddow's guest, Thomas Goldstein of SCOTUSblog, informed today that Sam Alito's "reversal rate," that is, the percentage of cases he handled that ended up in the Supreme Court and were overturned, was 100% (2 out of 2).

Goldstein uses this statistic to stress the fact that the statistic is useless, since most cases do not end up in the Supreme Court anyway, and those that do constitute a small number, too small to be statistically significant.
Sotomayor was accused by the Washington Times today of having a "high" reversal rate of 60%.

See video:

http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200905270055

[rockymountaindem]

1. Small sample size

I wouldn't read too much into that.

[AlexanderProgressive]

2. I explained that

And I noted that Goldstein explained that.

[rockymountaindem]

3. Then why bring it up?

[elleng]

4. What even Goldstein didn't mention:

When the Supremes reverse (or affirm) lower court decisions, its the DECISION of the entire court. ONE of the judges on that court writes the decision for the court, and other members of the court may simply agree, may add their own comments, may write their own separate opinions, and may disagree. SO to say that the court reversed HER decisions (or alito's) is really not correct.

I'm going to write to Rachel about this.