PLSC 400: Judicial Decision Making (Bowie): Data Sources

The primary mission of the JuRI is to provide a comprehensive access point to the most recent and cutting-edge research on law and judicial politics. At this website, individuals interested in law and judicial politics can download electronic datasets of court cases, obtain smaller datasets or measures of judicially relevant phenomena, read various working papers on important topics, and link to other websites containing law and judicial politics information.

The Appeals Courts Database Project was designed to create an extensive dataset to facilitate the empirical analysis of the votes of judges and the decisions of the U.S. Courts of Appeals. The database was designed to code a random sample of cases since 1925.

The State Supreme Court Data Project created a data base containing information on State Supreme Court decisions in all fifty states during their 1995 through 1998 sessions. This archive contains 21,000 decisions reached by over 400 state supreme court justices seated during those years. In addition to the data on the decisions themselves, we have assembled biographical data from published sources for all justices sitting in 1995 through 1998. Researchers may link the decisional and biographical date with measures of institutional structure and state contextual influences to perform rigorous comparative analyses of state surpreme courts.

NPR coverage of the recently published research on judicial decision making in the latest issue of Science Magazine.

Published article mentioned on NPR, describing the research methods and conclusions of their study on how psychiatric information can impact judicial decisions on sentencing.

The Supreme Court Database is the definitive source for researchers, students, journalists, and citizens interested in the U.S. Supreme Court. The Database contains over two hundred pieces of information about each case decided by the Court between the 1953 and 2008 terms. Examples include the identity of the court whose decision the Supreme Court reviewed, the parties to the suit, the legal provisions considered in the case, and the votes of the Justices.

This digital archive houses documents from the Harry A. Blackmun Papers located in the Library of Congress. In the archive now are preliminary [pool] memoranda and docket sheets from Justices Blackmun's years on the Rehnquist Court (1986-1993 terms).

Provides coded information on the content of universes or random samples of the decisions produced by eleven of the top ("High" or "Supreme") courts of the world's judicial systems for extended periods of time. The decisions included in the database are those formally reported in the reporters of record in each country.

The primary mission of the JuRI is to provide a comprehensive access point to the most recent and cutting-edge research on law and judicial politics. At this website, individuals interested in law and judicial politics can download electronic datasets of court cases, obtain smaller datasets or measures of judicially relevant phenomena, read various working papers on important topics, and link to other websites containing law and judicial politics information.