Legal Research

"Supreme Court Database"

From the e-newsletter: "Created and maintained by Professor Harold Spaeth of Michigan State University College of Law, the Supreme Court Database contains information about each case decided by the Court between the 1953 and 2009 terms. Interactive search tools allow users to design and run their own statistical analysis or look up data about individual cases by case name or citation. The database includes more than 200 elements of information about each case, including which court's decision was reviewed, how each justice voted, and links to the opinion on Westlaw, Lexis and Findlaw.com. Users can search cases by topic, limiting by "court era," by the law's constitutionality, and by individual justices. Because the database allows users to search by case, it is possible to analyze data with only basic statistical knowledge. Set to the right parameters, the database can answer questions like "Which decisions in the 1980s involved school desegregation?" or "In which criminal law cases did Justice Brennan and Chief Justice Burger vote the same way?"  There are two ways to analyze the data available from the database. First is the online version, which requires no specialized software. The analysis is performed on the website by specifying the set of cases of interest and then summarizing selected variables. Second, the website contains downloadable versions of the database in a variety of formats which can be used to perform more complicated analyses. The downloadable empirical datasets, which are fairly technical, are intended primarily for political scientists, but the search tools could be used by other researchers of the Court, such as journalists, librarians, and students.   Additionally, help is available on the site to aid users with searches and using the database to its fullest capability.  The database is continuously updated by the Supreme Court Database's research team. [KN]

Source: "InSite." Vol.15, No.15. 22 March 2010 Cornell University Law Library. To subscribe send the following request to: listproc@cornell.edu: Subscribe InSITE-L [YourFirstName] [YourLastName]  

Full post as published by Stark County Law Library Blawg on March 22, 2010 (boomark / email).