American Politics

Contains over two hundred pieces of information about each case decided by the Court, including variables about background and identification (e.g., docket numbers, originating court, chronology), substance of the case (e.g., legal provisions at issue), outcomes (e.g., winning party, alteration of precedent), and voting by the justices (e.g., size of winning coalition, who dissented). Currently covers 1946-2014 terms. Data available in multiple formats. Site also supports various kinds of online analysis.

Measures of judicial ideology showing the relative location of U.S. Supreme Court justices on an ideological continuum The Justices dataset contains the ideal point estimates and other quantities of interest for each justice in each term. The Court dataset contains court-specific quantities, including the estimated location of the median justice. Datasets in .txt, Stata, Excel, and SPSS formats.

Estimates 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.

Project 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.

The 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.

Provides statistical data and analysis on the business of the federal judiciary, including appellate, district, and bankruptcy courts; the probation and pretrial services systems; and other components of the U.S. courts. Download in Excel and PDF, 1990-present.

"Collects and analyzes data on federal court litigation brought from fiscal years 1997 to 2006, inclusive, by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency charged with enforcing the laws forbidding discrimination by private employers on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, and disability. The data capture various aspects of the agency's litigation activities, including detailed information regarding the participants, motions, events, and outcomes." Data in multiple formats.

"Under the blue slip policy, each home state senator is sent a query asking for their opinion and information on the nominee from their state. The queries were sent on blue paper by the chair of the Judiciary Committee and thus the nickname, the blue slip." This project codes blue slips available in the National Archives from 1910 to 1960 and allows searching by President, Congress number, nominee, state, court type, and nomination status. Digital scans of individual blue slips are available. Results can be exported as a .csv.

95% of all cases in the U.S. are filed in state courts. CSP collects and publishes state court caseload data from the courts of the fifty states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Guam. In addition to caseload statistics, it also has data on how state courts are organized and administered. Annual data from 2012 on; data can no longer be downloaded, but can be viewed in a Tableau display.

"Builds upon Brace, Langer, and Hall’s (2000) original measure of American state supreme court justice ideology—the PAJID scores. To do so, we gather new data on 1,666 state supreme court justices who served between 1970 and 2019 and update the PAJID scores throughout this period." Data in multiple formats.