What do you want to know about the Supreme Court?

Having thrown out some musings about a potential future project, I want to raise a question about a project I am currently working on.  This project arises out of my desire to evaluate, across doctrinal areas and legal issues, under what circumstances the Supreme Court announces standards without applying them to the facts at hand.  The United States Supreme Court Database, is of course, the logical place to start for anyone doing quantitative empirical research on Supreme Court case law.  But the architecture and coding of the database are not conducive to the kind of doctrinally-focused analysis I want to do.  As a result, I'm engaged now in exploring the implications of the limitations of the database for scholarship like mine.  I'd be very interested in learning about other scholars' experiences and wish lists.  Are there doctrinally-focused empirical questions you've tried to answer or want to address but that are difficult or impossible to undertake with the database as it -- as well as its counterpart, the Justice-Centered database --  exists now? I’ve read dozens of published works – but what about the projects that have not taken off?

Comments

[David Zaring]

Hmpf. Using the Supreme Court to understand the legal stystem can be like trying to understand parliamentary democracy by studying the House of Lords.

No, no, I jest. It would be interesting to figure out particular interpretive techniques and their rise and fall on the Court (and in other courts). That's hard to do. But I thought that Fred Schauer and Virginia Wise had an interesting study on the rise of the use of non-legal sources in adjudication. Their technique permits searching the text for words and phrases, and doing old school media studies style content analyses. I could see that providing some insights.