Legal Research

Supreme Court Database Website

The Supreme Court Database website is available at: http://supremecourtdatabase.org.

The database, originally created by Harold Spaeth of the Michigan State University College of Law, currently contains 247 pieces of information for each case, roughly broken down into six categories:

(1) identification variables (e.g., citations and docket numbers);
(2) background variables (e.g., how the Court took jurisdiction, origin and source of the case, the reason the Court agreed to decide it);
(3) chronological variables (e.g., the date of decision, term of Court, natural court);
(4) substantive variables (e.g., legal provisions, issues, direction of decision);
(5) outcome variables (e.g., disposition of the case, winning party, formal alteration of precedent, declaration of unconstitutionality); and
(6) voting and opinion variables (e.g., how the individual justices voted, their opinions and interagreements).

The new website makes this data much more accessible to researchers with various levels of expertise. A user-friendly interface allows for simple analysis by novices, while the site also contains downloadable formats for analysis in a variety of statistical packages.

With funding from the National Science Foundation, the contributors have begun the process of coding all cases from the court's first decision in 1792 to 1952, and will be regularly posting updates of this back-dating project over the next four years.

Full post as published by LexLibris on November 02, 2009 (boomark / email).