Political Science: Researching the Judicial Branch + Data

The Database contains over two hundred pieces of information about each case decided by the Court between the 1791 and current terms. Examples include the identity of the court whose decision the Supreme Court reviewed, the parties to the suit, the legal provisions considered in the case, and the votes of the Justices. Downloadable in CSV, DTA, POR, RDATA, SAV, XLSX, XPT.

Links to archived data:
United States Supreme Court Databases
United States Courts of Appeals Databases
Attributes of United States Federal Court Judges
National High Courts Databases
The Institutional History of the U.S. District Courts
Digital Archive of the Papers of Harry A. Blackmun
Lower Federal Court Confirmation Database, 1977-2004
Merged Phase I and Phase II Supreme Court Database
State Supreme Court Database
U.S. Supreme Court Amicus Curiae Database, 1946-2001
U.S. Supreme Court Justices Database

Presents detailed comparative data about how state trial and appellate courts are organized and administered

Between 1980 and 2011, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has sponsored the State Court Organization (SCO) data collection series. This collection serves as the primary source for detailed information on the structure and framework of the nations state trial and appellate courts. Data were collected under the SCO project in 1980, 1987, 1993, 1998, 2004, 2009, and 2011.

This data collection provides detailed comparative information about the structure, policies, and procedures of state-wide trial and appellate court systems for the 50 states and the District of Columbia within the United States for the years 1980, 1987, 1993, 1998, 2004, and 2011. Information gathered in the dataset includes: the number of courts and judges, judicial selection, governance of court systems (including judicial funding, administration, staffing, and procedures), jury qualifications and verdict rules, and processing and sentencing procedures of criminal cases. Data collection was carried out by the National Center for State Courts.

The purpose of this data collection is to provide an official public record of the business of the federal courts. The data originate from 100 court offices throughout the United States. Information was obtained at two points in the life of a case: filing and termination. The termination data contain information on both filing and terminations, while the pending data contain only filing information. For the appellate and civil data, the unit of analysis is a single case. The unit of analysis for the criminal data is a single defendant.

This data collection encompasses all aspects of United States Supreme Court decision-making from the beginning of the Warren Court in 1953 up to the completion of the 1995 term of the Rehnquist Court on July 1, 1996, including any decisions made afterward but before the start of the 1996 term on October 7, 1996. In this collection, distinct aspects of the court's decisions are covered by six types of variables: (1) identification variables including case citation, docket number, unit of analysis, and number of records per unit of analysis, (2) background variables offering information on origin of case, source of case, reason for granting cert, parties to the case, direction of the lower court's decision, and manner in which the Court takes jurisdiction, (3) chronological variables covering date of term of court, chief justice, and natural court, (4) substantive variables including multiple legal provisions, authority for decision, issue, issue areas, and direction of decision, (5) outcome variables supplying information on form of decision, disposition of case, winning party, declaration of unconstitutionality, and multiple memorandum decisions, and (6) voting and opinion variables pertaining to the vote in the case and to the direction of the individual justices' votes.

The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse is a collection of legal documents related to civil rights litigation. Because the cases and documents have been "coded" (or indexed), users can search the collection in a large variety of ways. Databases include:
Supreme Court Database
The Discography
Supreme Court Opinion Writing Database
As The Code Changes
Constituency-Level Elections
The EEOC Litigation Project

The BRD contains data on all of the more than one-thousand large public companies that filed bankruptcy cases between October 1, 1979 and December 2022. As of January 2023, the database is no longer being updated. The Cases table, which consists of about 200 fields of regression-ready data on each BRD case, is now available free.

Collateral consequences are legal and regulatory sanctions and restrictions that limit or prohibit people with criminal records from accessing employment, occupational licensing, housing, voting, education, and other opportunities.

Includes bulk download of federal and state court opinions, oral arguments, dockets, and judges; a citation database; and the judicial database of biographical information about judges. Site also includes online network visualization tool.

All published U.S. court decisions freely available to the public online, digitized from the collection of the Harvard Law School Library. Includes bulk download, API access, Historical Trends visualizer, and a variety of apps created using the data..

Every year, the Supreme Court’s nine justices fill out a form that discloses their financial connections to companies and people. Using ProPublica's database, you can search for organizations and people that have paid the justices, reimbursed them for travel, given them gifts and more.

Blog post that contextualizes and links to Google Sheet of gifts to Supreme Court justices dating back to January 2004.

Every year, federal judges must complete lengthy documents listing any investments or other potential sources of conflict that they may have. By statute, these documents are available to the public for six years before they must be destroyed. In 2017, the Free Law Project began collecting these documents so they would not be thrown away. After extracting the data from the files collected, they built a first-of-its-kind database of over a million investment transactions, and more than 250,000 pages of judicial records. All of the information you find here is also available via APIs or by browsing our database of judges.

Official database provides free online access to financial disclosure reports filed by judicial officers, including bankruptcy, magistrate, and special trial judges. The database contains downloadable electronic copies of all financial disclosure reports, including amended reports, that judges filed in 2022 and future years that are currently available for release.

Links to archived data:
United States Supreme Court Databases
United States Courts of Appeals Databases
Attributes of United States Federal Court Judges
National High Courts Databases
The Institutional History of the U.S. District Courts
Digital Archive of the Papers of Harry A. Blackmun
Lower Federal Court Confirmation Database, 1977-2004
Merged Phase I and Phase II Supreme Court Database
State Supreme Court Database
U.S. Supreme Court Amicus Curiae Database, 1946-2001
U.S. Supreme Court Justices Database

Includes the biographies of judges presidentially appointed to serve during good behavior since 1789 on the U.S. district courts, U.S. courts of appeals, Supreme Court of the United States, and U.S. Court of International Trade, as well as the former U.S. circuit courts, Court of Claims, U.S. Customs Court, and U.S. Court of Customs and Patent Appeals.

Includes biographic information and, in some cases, links to cases the justice was involved in before joining the Supreme Court. Oyez (pronounced OH-yay)—a free law project from Cornell’s Legal Information Institute (LII), Justia, and Chicago-Kent College of Law—is a multimedia archive devoted to making the Supreme Court of the United States accessible to everyone. It is the most complete and authoritative source for all of the Court’s audio since the installation of a recording system in October 1955. Oyez offers transcript-synchronized and searchable audio, plain-English case summaries, illustrated decision information, and full-text Supreme Court opinions (through Justia). Oyez also provides detailed information on every justice throughout the Court’s history and offers a panoramic tour of the Supreme Court building, including the chambers of several justices.