Previous research of judicial systems has faced a trade-off between large scale quantitative inquiries focused on readily-counted behaviors, and smaller studies that allow closer examination of legal texts. This project marks the first attempt to apply information retrieval and computational linguistics to the study of the US Supreme Court. In addition, future research will be facilitated by assembling a Supreme Court Text Collection (SCTC). During the course of this project, the investigators will compile, organize, and annotate more than 15,000 legal documents associated with cases heard by the US Supreme Court over the last half-century, and develop a set of semi-automated analytical tools to examine them more closely. The SCTC will be available to the larger academic community for additional research endeavors. The application of computational techniques to model the US judicial system represents an opportunity to overcome many of the bottlenecks associated with traditional manual, labor-intensive methods in political science, and also provides a new environment for the advancement of information retrieval and computational linguistic techniques. This project will employ a novel text-based computational model of the legal system with both explanatory and predictive power that will allow us to pose broad classes of theoretically interesting research questions. More importantly, this interdisciplinary approach, applying computational techniques to the study of legal systems, has the potential to revolutionize both the research agendas and the education of future social scientists. To facilitate this progress, the investigators plan to develop a course, "Computational Approaches to Analysis of Political Texts," and related research workshops that will equip other scholars, graduate students, and select undergraduate students with the skills necessary to apply computational methodologies to their own research questions.
