Hello!

Thanks to the Empirical Legal Studies crew for letting me guest blog here. Consistent with the motto of the blog, I hope to use my time with ELS to bring some method to the madness that seems likely to swirl around Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings this summer.

 

For the past two years I have been compiling a dataset capturing all of the statements made by senators and Supreme Court nominees at the confirmation hearings held by the Senate Judiciary Committee.  The dataset starts with the Felix Frankfurter’s hearing and ends with Justice Alito’s. I have coded by issue area all statements made by the nominees and senators. Each unit of analysis includes information about the political party of the questioning senator, the appointing president, and the committee chair. The dataset also captures instances where a court case was discussed by name, and includes variables indicating whether the statement being coded addressed constitutional interpretation, statutory interpretation, or federalism.

 

I hope to use this data to provide real-time commentary on the confirmation hearings this summer.  Because Supreme Court vacancies occur so infrequently, our discussion of the confirmation process often lacks historical perspective. I hope this data can help rectify that, by bringing concrete information to conversations about what has – and has not – been “the norm” in this process. 

 

I also hope that the ELS community will provide feedback about how to use and improve this dataset. This is in many ways a ‘test run’ of the data, so I look forward to hearing your comments about it. I’m also open to suggestions regarding what type of information you think would be interesting to pull out of the dataset.

 

First up: What makes a confirmation contentious?