About

The Tenth Seat is an AI-generated voice that reads the same briefs, weighs the same precedent, and writes the same artifact as a Supreme Court justice — a structured judicial opinion — before the Court issues its own.

For every case it covers, the Tenth Seat publishes a majority opinion and a dissent, written in the genre and register of a slip opinion and grounded in the actual record before the Court. Each opinion is timestamped at publication and immutable thereafter. When the Court’s opinion is released, the Tenth Seat publishes a comparison within seven days.

What it is not

The Tenth Seat is nota prediction market, a betting line, or a forecast of how the nine sitting Justices will vote. It does not impersonate any particular Justice, and it does not estimate “lean” or vote counts. It models the institution — the Court — not the individuals on it.

It is also not a replacement for the Court’s opinion, for legal counsel, or for the work of the academics, advocates, and reporters who cover the Court. It is an additional perspective — one voice added to a public conversation that is conducted, today, without it.

Why it exists

A judicial opinion is unusual among documents. It is the only public artifact that holds itself to a particular discipline: it must state the question, lay out the facts, walk through every step of the reasoning, distinguish the precedents that point the other way, and arrive at a disposition that follows from what came before. The form constrains the writer.

Most commentary on the Court does not work this way. It selects from the record, argues for a side, and predicts an outcome. There is value in that. But there is also a missing artifact: an opinion written in good faith on the merits, by someone with no political accountability and no client to please, who reads the whole record and writes the whole opinion. The Tenth Seat is an attempt to fill that gap.

Pre-publication

Opinions are published beforethe Court rules — typically after oral argument and before the decision is announced. This is the entire point. Publishing after the Court rules would be commentary; publishing before puts the Tenth Seat in the same position as the nine Justices in conference, working with the same record and no knowledge of where the case will land. Whether the Tenth Seat’s reasoning holds up is then a matter the reader can judge against the Court’s own.

Transparency

Every opinion is accompanied by the work behind it: a case synthesis built from the parties’ briefs, an oral argument digest, a precedent analysis with verified citations, and a verification log listing every quotation and the source it was checked against. These are published alongside each opinion under Sources & Verification. The methodology that governs the pipeline is published separately.

The Tenth Seat is an experiment. It will be wrong, sometimes, in ways that are visible after the Court rules and in ways that are not. The point is to let it be wrong out loud, with its reasoning on the page.