Spaeth's Supreme Court Database

For those of you interested in empirical research on the U.S. Supreme Court, I'd like to call your attention to a set of articles in the most recent Law & Courts that may be of use.  Kirk Randazzo's discussion of the Ulmer Project, my article entitled "Becoming an Intelligent User of the Spaeth Databases" and Paul Collins' article entitled "Transforming the Original U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Database" may all be of use, especially to new users.  I'm happy to take questions about the databases as well, either here on the blog or via email ([email protected]).

Comments

[Michael Heise]

I want to second Sara's invitation to explore the Spaeth S.Ct. databases. Despite my nagging sense that U.S. Sup. Ct. decisions are comparatively over-studied (admittedly, a pet-peeve of mine), many important research questions persist and these databases are critical to them. Also, although Sara is far too gracious to self-promote, her L&C Newsletter piece will absolutely assist the unfamiliar navigate through the Spaeth databases. Finally, in an incredible act of scholarly collegiality, the Newsletter also contains a piece by Paul Collins (Houston) that provides Stata coding suggestions necessary for important database transformations. (Evidently, Sara contributed similar code in 1998.)