This data collection is an expanded version of UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT JUDICIAL DATABASE, 1953-1996 TERMS (ICPSR 9422), encompassing all aspects of United States Supreme Court decision-making from the beginning of the Vinson Court in 1946 to the end of the Warren Court in 1968. Two major differences distinguish the expanded version of the database from the original collection: the addition of data on the decisions of the Vinson Court, and the inclusion of the conference votes of the Vinson and Warren courts. Whereas the original collection contained only the vote as reported in the UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT REPORTS, the expanded database includes all votes cast in conference. Concomitant with the expansion of the database is a shift in its basic unit of analysis. The original collection contained every case in which at least one justice wrote an opinion, and cases without opinions were excluded. This version includes every case in which the Court cast a conference vote, with and without opinions. The justices cast many more votes than they wrote opinions, and hence, the number of Warren Court records in this version increased by more than a factor of two over the original version. As in the original collection, distinct aspects of the Court's decisions are covered by six types of variables: (1) identification variables including case citation, docket number, unit of analysis, and number of records per unit of analysis, (2) background variables offering information on origin of case, source of case, reason for granting cert, parties to the case, direction of the lower court's decision, and manner in which the Court takes jurisdiction, (3) chronological variables covering date of term of court, chief justice, and natural court, (4) substantive variables including multiple legal provisions, authority for decision, issue, issue areas, and direction of decision, (5) outcome variables supplying information on form of decision, disposition of case, winning party, declaration of unconstitutionality, and multiple memorandum decisions, and (6) voting and opinion variables pertaining to the vote in the case and to the direction of the individual justices' votes.

It is estimated that ***** to ***** new cases are filed to the Supreme Court of the United States each term. Each term, the court grants arguments to around ** of those. For the 2022-2022 term, the Court decided ** cases.

Investigator(s): Harold J. Spaeth, James L. Gibson, Michigan State University This data collection encompasses all aspects of United States Supreme Court decision-making from the beginning of the Warren Court in 1953 up to the completion of the 1995 term of the Rehnquist Court on July 1, 1996, including any decisions made afterward but before the start of the 1996 term on October 7, 1996. In this collection, distinct aspects of the court's decisions are covered by six types of variables: (1) identification variables including case citation, docket number, unit of analysis, and number of records per unit of analysis, (2) background variables offering information on origin of case, source of case, reason for granting cert, parties to the case, direction of the lower court's decision, and manner in which the Court takes jurisdiction, (3) chronological variables covering date of term of court, chief justice, and natural court, (4) substantive variables including multiple legal provisions, authority for decision, issue, issue areas, and direction of decision, (5) outcome variables supplying information on form of decision, disposition of case, winning party, declaration of unconstitutionality, and multiple memorandum decisions, and (6) voting and opinion variables pertaining to the vote in the case and to the direction of the individual justices' votes.Years Produced: Annually

Justice Clarence Thomas is currently the longest serving Supreme Court Justice, with a tenure of over 32.87 years. Chief Justice John Roberts has served on the bench for a little over 18 years, while the newest addition to the Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, has been serving since June 30, 2022.

The purpose of this data collection was to record information about the cases, litigants, amicus participants, and the opinions decided by the Supreme Court under the tenure of Chief Justices Earl Warren (1953-1969) and Warren Burger (1969-1986) and others through 1993. The approach of this study was to proceed deductively, rather than seek to infer values of a particular group of justices. This method allows the investigation of value conflicts that are not litigated, as well as the value conflicts represented in Supreme Court opinions. Opinions are coded on the basis of their literal content, and the data are organized around the opinions. There are eight types of opinions. Within each type, up to six topics are coded, and within each topic, up to two values are coded. There are three integrated parts to this study, each of which can be linked to the other files by specific variables. Part 1, Supreme Court Database, contains basic case attributes from UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT JUDICIAL DATABASE, 1953-1993 TERMS (ICPSR 9422) and the opinions given in the cases. Part 2, Briefs, gives information on the filers and co-filers for cases in which amicus curie briefs were filed. Part 3, Groups, lists the litigants' names. The distinct aspects of the Court's decisions are covered by six types of variables in Part 1: (1) identification variables including case citation, docket number, unit of analysis, and number of records per unit of analysis, (2) background variables offering information on origin of case, source of case, reason for granting cert, parties to the case, direction of the lower court's decision, and manner in which the Court takes jurisdiction, (3) chronological variables covering date of term of court, chief justice, and natural court, (4) substantive variables including multiple legal provisions, authority for decision, issue, issue areas, and direction of decision, (5) outcome variables supplying information on form of decision, disposition of case, winning party, declaration of unconstitutionality, and multiple memorandum decisions, and (6) voting and opinion variables pertaining to the vote in the case and to the direction of the individual justices' votes.

As of July 2025, *********** of surveyed Americans said that the Supreme Court should not be expanded to include more than nine Supreme Court Justices. A further ** percent of respondents were unsure whether or not the Court should be expanded.

This data collection encompasses all aspects of United States Supreme Court decision-making from the beginning of the Warren Court in 1953 to the completion of the most recent term of the Rehnquist Court. In this collection, distinct aspects of the Court's decisions are covered by six types of variables: (1) identification variables including citations and docket numbers, (2) background variables offering information on how the Court took jurisdiction, origin and source of case, and the reason the Court granted cert, (3) chronological variables covering date of decision, Court term, and natural court, (4) substantive variables including legal provisions, issues, and direction of decision, (5) outcome variables supplying information on disposition of case, winning party, formal alteration of precedent, and declaration of unconstitutionality, and (6) voting and opinion variables pertaining to how individual justices voted, their opinions and interagreements, and the direction of their votes.

We construct the complete network of 30,288 majority opinions written by the U.S. Supreme Court and the cases they cite from 1754 to 2002 in the United States Reports. Data from this network demonstrates quantitatively the evolution of the norm of stare decisis in the 19th Century and a significant deviation from this norm by the activist Warren Court. We further describe a method for creating authority scores using the network data to identify the most important court precedents. This method yields rankings that conform closely to evaluations by legal experts, and even predicts which cases they will identify as important in the future. An analysis of these scores over time allows us to test several hypotheses about the rise and fall of precedent. We show that reversed cases tend to be much more important than other decisions, and the cases that overrule them quickly become and remain even more important as the reversed decisions decline. We also show that the Court is careful to ground overruling decisions in past precedent, and the care it exercises is increasing in the importance of the decision that is overruled. Finally, authority scores corroborate qualitative assessments of which issues and cases the Court prioritizes and how these change over time.

The authors argue that levels of concurrence and dissent on the United States Supreme Court are functions of "consensual norms." These norms arise from, and are influenced by, the behaviors of the individual justices, including the actions of the Chief Justices. In turn, they cause concurrences and dissents to fluctuate around a common level. If consensual norms are a substantial influence on the behavior of the Court, the long-run extent of concurrence and dissent on the Court will covary substantially, and will do so to varying degrees under different Chief Justices. To test their hypotheses, the authors used cointegration and error-correction analyses of the number of Supreme Court cases with concurring and dissenting opinions, from 1800 to 1991. Because of the dramatic increase in concurrences and dissents during the 1940s, they made use of recently-developed methods for detecting cointegrating relationships in the presence of structural breaks. Consistent with expectations, dissents and concurrences moved together over time. Thus consensual norms appeared to influence substantially both concurrences and dissents on the Court. The effects of such norms vary in the long term under different Chief Justices.

Replication Data for: Komatsu, Tim, and Paul M. Collins, Jr. 2025. “The Consistency of Federalist Society-Affiliated U.S. Supreme Court Justices.” PLOS One.

Have perceptions of the U.S. Supreme Court polarized, much like the rest of American politics? Because of the Court’s unique role, for many years it remained one of the few institutions respected by both Democrats and Republicans alike. But the Court’s dramatic shift to the right in recent years—highlighted by its Dobbs decision in 2022—potentially upends that logic. Using both 8 waves of panel data and 18 nationally representative surveys spanning two decades, we show that while there was little evidence of partisan polarization in earlier years, in 2022 and 2023, such patterns are clear in favorability, trust, legitimacy, and support for reform. Factors that used to protect the Court—like knowledge about it and support for key democratic values—no longer do so. The Court has also become more important to voters, and will likely remain a political flashpoint, with disquieting implications for the Court’s place in our polity.

Data Overview All data and documents contained in this entry were collected for a project that sought to measure and understand a particular phenomenon of decision-making on collegial courts, with a focus on the United States Supreme Court. What happens when a high court, composed of several justices or judges, issues a ruling on the merits without also issuing a clear precedent for lower courts to follow? Why does this happen? How frequently does it happen? What are the consequences of this phenomenon for American law and society? This inquiry led to two publications: Hitt, Matthew P. 2019. Inconsistency and Indecision in the United States Supreme Court. Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Press. Hitt, Matthew P. 2016. “Measuring Precedent in a Judicial Hierarchy.” Law & Society Review 50(1): 57-81. The main argument advanced in these works is: The Supreme Court historically emphasized the goal of dispute resolution, evolving into a Court that now prioritizes an alternative goal of logically consistent legal doctrine. As a result, the Court today fails to resolve more underlying questions in law and society, in part in order to minimize criticism of its output from other elites. In so doing, the modern Court often fails to live up to its Constitutional obligation. Data Organization There are two main forms of data available in this entry. Archival materials of the justices’ deliberations in cases that resulted in unreasoned judgments in the modern era. These materials are organized by case and justice. Materials were collected from the various justices’ papers, archived at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Materials include draft opinions with marginalia, formal memos between justices, informal, private memos between justices and clerks, and letters from justices to external third parties. These materials can be used to replicate the analysis found in the 2019 book, in particular the theory expounded in Chapter 1. Files explicitly featured in the book include their respective chapter number in the filename and are stored in a separate ‘Book’ folder; supplemental files include ‘Sup’ in the filename and are stored in separate folders organized by case names. Quantitative datasets and code in Stata 15.0 format to replicate the statistical analyses found in the 2019, organized by chapter. The details of these statistical analyses are found in the Technical Appendix B in the 2019 book.

This is data to accompany an article by Eric C. Nystrom and David S. Tanenhaus, "'Our Most Sacred Legal Commitments:' A Digital Exploration of the U.S. Supreme Court Defining Who We Are and How They Should Opine," University of Cincinnati Law Review 89, no. 4 (May 2021).

Data Creation

This data was generated using the "cap-tools" suite of programs (written by Eric C. Nystrom and available at https://github.com/ericnystrom/captools). The current data version (05202020, 07152020) included with this repository was generated by running "cap-tools" against:

Caselaw Access Project (CAP), United States jurisdiction, rev. 20200303

CAP New York jurisdiction rev. 20200302

Harold J. Spaeth, Lee Epstein, Andrew D. Martin, Jeffrey A. Segal, Theodore J. Ruger, and Sara C. Benesh. 2019 Supreme Court Database, Version 2019 Release 01. URL: http://Supremecourtdatabase.org

Harold J. Spaeth, Lee Epstein, Andrew D. Martin, Jeffrey A. Segal, Theodore J. Ruger, and Sara C. Benesh. 2019 Supreme Court Database, Version Legacy Release 05. URL: http://Supremecourtdatabase.org

Eric C. Nystrom and David S. Tanenhaus, (2020). Connecting U.S. Supreme Court Case Information and Opinion Authorship (SCDB) to Full Case Text Data (CAP), 1791-2011 (Version 1.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4344917

Data Files

"CURRENT-our-kwic-cap-scdb" is a TSV of keyword-in-context (KWIC) results for the term "our," with a six word window on each side of the term. Basic results were then filtered to exclude any results that were not found in the SCDB-CAP map, and the SCDB ID was added. The file contains 79693 records plus a first-line header.

Fields:

1: "cap-id" -- ID of the case in CAP system. 2: "casename" -- short form of the case name 3: "cite" -- reporter citation (typically US Reports) 4: "date" -- year the case was decided 5: "courtname" -- Court name, in CAP. This should be "U.S." for US Supreme Court, but some records were misfiled within the CAP data and have something else here. These were manually checked for actually being US Supreme Court records, however. 6: "courtslug" -- CAP "slug" representing this court. Typically "us" but there are a handful of variations. 7: "numopins" -- Number of opinions in CAP in this case, with counting beginning at 1. CAP's detection routines get this right a lot, but there are definitely exceptions where the actual opinion count in the case, as measured by a human observer, would be different. 8: "opintype" -- The type of opinion, as determined by CAP. Generally right, with some allowance for errors, as mentioned in the other fields. 9: "opinnum" -- The number of the particular opinion in this case from which this match was drawn. 1-based counting. 10: "casematch" -- The sequential number of this match for the case as a whole, numbered from 1. 11: "opinmatch" -- The sequential number of this match for this opinion only, numbered from 1. 12: "before" -- the string of words prior to the matching word; in this data, six words. (lowercase) 13: "term" -- the term itself, here, it is always "our" 14: "after" -- the string of six words following the term (lowercase) 15: "scdb-id" -- the SCDB identification number of this case, matched using the CAP-SCDB match described above.

"CURRENT-our-pos-cap-scdb" -- a TSV file very similar to the KWIC results file described above, with the same header and field structure, and the same results from a case perspective. The difference is that the text in fields 12, 13, and 14 was tagged with parts of speech (POS) using the Perl Lingua::EN::Tagger library, v0.28, by Aaron Coburn. The window was lengthened to seven words on each side of "our" and then tags were applied, but since the tagger also tags punctuation separately in many cases, sometimes more than seven term/TAG "words" exist in fields 12 and 14. A complete list of the tags supported by the tagger and their grammatical meanings can be found at: https://metacpan.org/source/ACOBURN/Lingua-EN-Tagger-0.30/README

"RESULTS-our-kwic-followers-opinauth-chief_071520.tsv" further extends the results contained in the files above, by isolating the noun phrase following "our" using the grammatical tags above. These noun phrases were individually categorized by our legal historian as constitutive of "culture" or "process" (or falling into an ambiguous category). (See Tanenhaus and Nystrom, listed above.) The data was further augmented by applying the opinion author's name and SCDB author ID number from the corrected opinion authorship information, available separately as Nystrom and Tanenhaus (cite above). The Chief Justice information was also added, from SCDB.

"our-casecount-by-year_normalized.tsv" -- a TSV file containing 4 columns and no header. Column 1 is the year, column 2 is the number of individual cases (not opinions) decided in that year that contained the word "our," column 3 is the total number of cases decided in that year, and column 4 is the percentage of column 3 represented by column 2 (i.e. percent of cases in a year containing "our"). Note that number of cases per year is determined from SCDB, so any minor actions such as denial of cert not included in SCDB would not be included here either.

This project orignally was undertaken to compile a definitive database on the personal, social, economic, career, and political attributes of judges who served on the United States Courts of Appeals from 1801 to 1994 - it has now been updated to include information through the year 2000. The database includes conventional social background variables such as appointing president, religion, political party affiliation, education, and prior experience. In addition, unique items are provided: the temporal sequence of prior career experiences, the timing of and reason for leaving the bench, gender, race and ethnicity, position numbering analogous to the scheme used for the Supreme Court, American Bar Association rating, and net worth (for judges who began service on the bench after 1978). The second objective of this project was to merge these data with a multi-user database on United States Courts of Appeals decisions that is headed by Donald Songer and funded by the National Science Foundation. That database includes a unique identification number for each judge participating in a particular decision. The combined databases should enable scholars to explore: (1) intra- and inter-circuit fluctuation in the distribution of social background characteristics, (2) generational and presidential cohort variation in these attributes, and (3) state and partisan control of seats. The collection also facilitates the construction of models that examine the effects of personal attributes on decision-making, while controlling for the conditions above.

The past several decades have witnessed tremendous growth in the number of professional representatives in the Washington community. Despite a wealth of research that testifies to the importance of these experts in the legislative and executive branches, we know comparatively little regarding sophisticated representation in the judicial context. Is there an identifiable group of specialized representatives in the U.S. Supreme Court? Under the rubric of network theory, I examine the bar of the Court and the patterns of association within it. With survey data from lawyers who participated in Supreme Court litigation during the 1986 term, I develop a predictive model that suggests that the lawyers in the Court are a discrete collection of representatives, strongly anchored in Washington, DC. While many are connected through legal education, geography, and generational affinity, the core of that group--former law clerks to the justices, alumni of the Solicitor General's Office, and the lawyers of the leading law firms in Washington--are the prominent experts within that network.

We offer a framework in which the U.S. Supreme Court drives aggregate responses to its decisions by signaling the utility of its precedents to the lower courts. Specifically, we theorize that lower court judges have a greater propensity to rely on a Supreme Court precedent when it is reinforced by one or more summary decisions. Our results demonstrate that the presence of summary decisions significantly increases the frequency with which the lower courts rely on the precedents of the U.S. Supreme Court. We corroborate the causality of these linkages through qualitative analyses, distance matching methods, and simultaneous sensitivity analysis.

In pursuing their goals, members of the U.S. Supreme Court are affected by their institutional setting. How has that institutional environment changed over time and what have been the political consequences of those changes? Despite considerable analysis of the institutional dynamics of legislatures and executives, political scientists have been slow to bring time series techniques to the study of the Supreme Court, and as a result much less is known about its evolutionary path. Measuring a variety of organizational characteristics, I construct an index of the institutionalization of the Supreme Court from 1790 to 1996. This indicator suggests that the integration of the Court into the system of federal policy making has better enabled the justices to satisfy their objectives. To demonstrate this empirically, I test a series of error correction models of judicial influence, each of which confirms that the nature of the Supreme Court’s character has had considerable implications for the scope of the justices’ legal and political impact. These results underscore the need for judicial scholars to examine the Court’s policy making in longitudinal perspective.

Theories of the relationship between the Supreme Court and the public assume that the public can potentially monitor the Court's behavior. We seek to measure the impact of Court decisions on public awareness of its cases. Public awareness of cases varies according to individual differences: more educated, knowledgeable, and informationally-motivated citizens are more likely to report awareness. Further, decision announcements increase awareness more generally, especially in cases of moderate salience. The results suggest that while the public may eventually respond to the behavior of national institutions, this response is likely first filtered through an elite subset of the population.

Comprehensive dataset containing 1 verified Supreme court businesses in New York, United States with complete contact information, ratings, reviews, and location data.

The Supreme Court Compendium is the only reference that presents historical and statistical information on all important aspects of the U.S. Supreme Court, including its history, development as an institution, the justices’ backgrounds, nominations, and confirmations, and the Court’s relationship with the public and other governmental and judicial bodies. An institutional overview of the Court’s history including: a chronology of important events from 1787-2002; important Congressional legislation relating to the Supreme Court; Internet sites relating to law and courts and much more. In this comprehensive reference, readers will find: Background information on all the justices such as family backgrounds, childhood environments, marital status, educational and employment histories, political experiences and trends in voting agreement. More than 170 tables and charts presenting information like the success rate of the United States as a party before the Supreme Court and the rates of success of various administrative agencies. Also, the state participation in court litigation and their rate of success. This new edition is updated to cover Supreme Court events through the 2001-2002 term. This reference will be invaluable to judicial scholars, students, and those int erested in the history of the Supreme Court.