Professor Harold Spaeth (Mich. St., Poli Sci) recently announced an updated Burger Court dataset, with attendant documentation. This dataset is managed by the good folks at the University of Kentucky's S. Sidney Ulmer Project for Research in Law and Judicial Politics. According to Harold:
"This version contains a 3.64 percent random sample, stratified by term, of petitions (mostly cert) denied by the Supreme Court. The inclusion of these data will now make it possible for researchers to easily avoid selection on the dependent variable, the bane of most previous studies of the Court's agenda setting. This database, then, provides users for the first time with data necessary to investigate the Court's agenda setting behavior over a substantial number of sequential terms: here the entire Burger Court, 1969-1986."
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