Sources of Legal and Judicial Data
Legal and judicial data are used to study the law with quantitative or empirical methods, and is quite different from traditional legal research. The tools listed below provide data sets and other helpful tools and information for this type of research.
- The Oxford Handbook of Empirical Legal Research byPublication Date: 2010This volume provides a guide to one of the central developments in modern legal scholarship. 43 chapters trace the development of the field, its methodology, and its contribution to understanding every aspect of the modern legal world - from policing to finance, employment to the environment.
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies: The Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (JELS) is a peer-edited, peer-refereed, interdisciplinary journal that publishes high-quality, emirically-oriented articles of interest to scholars in a diverse range of law and law-related fields, including civil justice, corporate law, criminal justice, domestic relations, economics, finance, health care, political science, psychology, public policy, securities regulation, and sociology.
Supreme Court Database: Known commonly as the Spaeth data set, it provides over two hundred pieces of information about each case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. It provides two large sets of data, one covering 1791-1945, and one covering 1946-2018.
The Judicial Research Initiative, sponsored by the University of South Carolina : This site allows users to download electronic datasets of court cases, including Federal Courts of Appeals 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. Also contains data for foreign high courts.
- DSS Judicial/Legal System/Law ListingsData and Statistical Services unit maintains the library's data sources. This link provides access to the data sources with subjects related to legal systems and law.
- FastCase: Caselaw, Statutes and Administrative LawProvides access to the texts of federal and state caselaw, statutes, and regulations, as well as federal administrative opinions. All published federal and state caselaw is included. Federal and state statutes and regulations go back to 2008. Federal administrative opinions include opinions from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Patent Trial and Appeal Board, various immigration agencies, and others. Access requires knowledge of a programming language such as Python or R.
- Carp-Manning U.S. District Court DatabaseContains decision-making data on 110,000+ decisions by federal district court judges handed down from 1927 to 2012. The dataset includes coded decisions published in the Federal Supplement, the primary publication venue for U.S. district court rulings. This data is a resource for scholars who conduct quantitative research on the federal courts and complements the U.S. Supreme Court and U.S. Courts of Appeals databases.
- Harvard Caselaw Access ProjectIncludes all official, book-published United States case law — every volume designated as an official report of decisions by a court within the United States. Scope includes all state courts and federal courts. Research scholars can qualify for bulk data access by agreeing to certain use and redistribution restrictions. You can request a bulk access agreement by creating an account and then visiting your account page.
- ICPSR (Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research) This link opens in a new windowWorld's largest archive of digital social science data.
- TRACFed This link opens in a new windowData warehouse providing access to detailed data on trends and individual activities/transactions of U.S. federal government staffing, spending, judicial performance, and criminal, civil, and administrative enforcement actions.
- American Bench This link opens in a new window
Searchable database containing biographical information of over 20,000 federal and state Judges. Also contains information on over 2600 federal and state courts, 3,000 detailed court profiles, and over 100 detailed judicial jurisdictional maps. Updated daily.
Judicial Business of the United States Courts: Annual Reports: Provides statistics on the work of the Federal Judiciary for a fiscal year, comparing data between years, and, when possible, explaining increases or decreases in caseloads. Separate sections of the report address the appellate, district, and bankruptcy courts; the probation and pretrial services system; and other components of the Federal Judiciary. Caseload totals for the major programs of the Federal Judiciary appear in the table of judicial caseload indicators.
Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts: Provides statistical data on the business of the federal Judiciary. Specific publications address the work of the appellate, district, and bankruptcy courts; the probation and pretrial services systems; and other components of the U.S. courts.
State Court Statistics Project: Publishes caseload data from the courts of the fifty states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.
International Courts Data, Georgetown University: This web-site provides a portal for students and scholars interested in the empirical study of international courts. Most importantly, the site provides access to datasets collected by various scholars.
Attributes of U.S. Federal Judges Database: Database on the personal, social, economic, career and political attributes of judges who served on the United States Courts of Appeals from 1801 to 2000.
Federal Court Cases Integrated Database Series: Contains data back to 1970 on civil case and criminal defendant filings and terminations in the federal courts.
Martin-Quinn Scores: Measuring the relative location of U.S. Supreme Court justices on an ideological continuum allows us to better understand the politics of the high court.
- Bailey Ideal Points Scores, 1951-2011Estimates ideal points for each Supreme Court justice, president, senator, and representative for each year from 1951 to 2011 allowing for comparison of ideology across institutions using a common measure. Also provides Supreme Court and congressional medians for each year from 1951 to 2011. Data in Excel.
- Biographical Directory of Article III Federal Judges, 1789-presentThe directory includes the biographies of judges appointed since 1789 to the Supreme Court of the United States, the U.S. courts of appeals, the U.S. district courts, the former U.S. circuit courts, and the federal judiciary's courts of special jurisdiction. These judges were appointed by the president, with the advice and consent of the Senate. In addition, the directory includes the biographies of judges who received presidential recess appointments to the aforementioned courts but were not confirmed by the Senate to permanent positions. Includes many biographical elements, including gender, race, birthplace, ABA rating, degree history, and professional synopsis. Full database can be downloaded as .csv file.
- Women on High Courts DatasetProvides over-time and cross-national data on women on high courts. The dataset includes information on the year the first woman was appointed and the gender composition of the high court. High courts include single peak courts as found in many common law countries and constitutional courts and highest appellate courts as found in many civil law countries." Data on first woman: 1946–2020; data on composition: 1970 or court creation–2013. Countries included have a population of 200,000 or greater. Data compiled from a combination of secondary sources and information from countries' courts and judges. Data in multiple formats.
- Judicial Review of Congress DatabaseProject by Keith Whittington catalogs all the cases in which the U.S. Supreme Court has substantively reviewed the constitutionality of a provision or application of a federal law, both those upholding and invalidating provisions of federal statutes. Currently includes 1308 cases decided by the Court from its founding through its October 2017 term and related pieces of information about those cases. Data in Excel.
- Selected State Substantive and Preemptive Laws 2009-2018, United States (umich.edu)The Selected State Preemptive Laws Dataset (SSPLD) was developed to study trends in preemption laws across states from 2009-2018. Researchers selected four domains where states and localities had enacted substantive and preemptive laws: (1) Paid sick days, (2) food, (3) tobacco, and (4) firearms. For three of these domains (sick days, food, and tobacco), state substantive laws are also included in this dataset for each of the policy topics included in the domain.
- Research Data on International CourtsIn order to improve the accessibility of research data on international courts, this website provides an overview of and links to official data sources and datasets made available by researchers, including data compiled by researchers at PluriCourts.
- The CEPS EurLex DatasetThe dataset contains 142.036 EU laws - almost the entire corpus of the EU's legally binding acts passed between 1952 - 2019. It encompasses the three types of legally binding acts passed by the EU institutions: 102.304 regulations, 4.070 directives, 35.798 decisions in English language. The dataset was scraped from the official EU legal database (Eur-lex.eu) and transformed in machine-readable CSV format with the programming languages R and Python.
The dataset was collected by the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) for the TRIGGER project (https://trigger-project.eu/). - Indian Court CasesProvides data on 81.2 million court cases in India’s lower judiciary between 2010 and 2018, drawn from the country’s e-Courts platform. It’s “the largest open-access dataset on judicial proceedings in the world,” says project coauthor Aditi Bhowmick. The public dataset contains each case’s state, district, court, case type, filing and decision dates, defendant and petitioner genders, legal codes, and more. It “has been fully anonymized to prevent the identification of individual judges or litigants,” but researchers can apply for more extensive access.
- Corpus of Decisions: Permanent Court of International Justice (CD-PCIJ)Collects and presents for the first time in human- and machine-readable formats all documents of PCIJ Series A, B and A/B of the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ). Among these are judgments, advisory opinions, orders, appended minority opinions, annexes, applications instituting proceedings and requests for an advisory opinion.
- Corpus of Decisions: International Court of Justice (CD-ICJ)Collects and presents for the first time in human- and machine-readable form all published decisions of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Among these are judgments, advisory opinions and orders, as well as their respective appended minority opinions (declarations, separate opinions and dissenting opinions).
- Congressional Representation by Petition: Assessing the Voices of the Voteless in a Comprehensive New Database, 1789-1949Programs and data sets used for "Congressional Representation by Petition: Assessing the Voices of the Voteless in a Comprehensive New Database, 1789-1949" published in Legislative Studies Quarterly. (2020-07-29)
- IUROPA ProjectThe IUROPA Project’s CJEU Database “is the most complete collection of research-ready data about the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and European Union (EU) law.” Developed from several official sources by Stein Arne Brekke et al., the database provides tables of all cases (45,000+), parties (85,000+), proceedings (47,000+), decisions (50,000+), citations (1,000,000+), judges (270+), and more from the court’s inception in 1952 through 2022. That first table, for instance, lists each case’s name, ID, sub-court, year, judgment status, appeal status, and additional details.
- Federal Court DocketsJournalist Matt Clark has compiled a database of more than 350 million docket entries across more than 13 million cases in 180+ federal courts — including the majority of district, appellate, and bankruptcy courts. The records, which Clark collected through the RSS feeds that many federal courts provide, span 2013 to the near-present. Clark’s downloadable database provides information about each docket entry (time filed, entry number, description, and URL), case (number, name, type, and URL), and court. Although the database does not include the docketed documents themselves, they can be retrieved from Docket Alarm (Princeton users only).
- Updating PAJID Scores for State Supreme Court Justices (1970-2019)Calculated ideology scores (on a conservative-liberal continuum) for 1,600+ state supreme court justices from 1970 to 2019. For each justice and year, the dataset provides the justice’s state, last name, political affiliation, the authors’ ideology score estimates, and ideology scores produced by two other research teams.
