Scientific study of the judicial process in the United States began several decades ago with the pioneering work of such scholars like J. Willard Hurst (the University of Wisconsin), Karl Llewellyn (the University of Chicago), and E. Adamson Hoebel (the University of Minnesota). In the early days of this movement, scholars were quite concerned about focusing their attention on the law-in-action in addition to the traditional interest in law-on-the-books. The key characteristic of this approach was its belief in examining theories, abstract concepts, and hypotheses about the role of law, courts, and legal processes in everyday life in terms of their actual operations. This commitment to scientific inquiry on law is being pursued through the U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Data Base Project. The project is designed to provide systematic, reliable, and standardized data on the operations of the Supreme Court. Beginning with the decisions of the Warren and Burger Courts, the data base contains extensive information on the kinds of cases that come before the Court, the types of decisions being made by the Court, the voting behavior and opinions of individual justices, and the nature of the parties engaged in litigation before the Court. This data set is intended as a resource for a wide-ranging group of scientists and legal scholars interested in analyzing a variety of questions about the public's use of law and the workings of the Court. In other fields, scholars often have a wealth of readily accessible and standardized data on which to draw. Until the development of this data set, judicial scholars painstakingly compiled their own data de novo from court records. Not only was this expensive, but it meant that there was little sustained attention to developing comparable measures of theoretical and practical significance. Phase I of this work is being conducted by Dr. Harold J. Spaeth at Michigan State University. The Phase II project, under the direction of Dr. Gibson, involves the expansion of this data set, an extensive reliability study, and data preparation and documentation to insure the usability of this resource. A Board of Overseers of active scholars in the research community continues to advise on the execution of this project. With this funding, NSF will have supported the creation of a data base that is unique, heretofore unavailable, intended to reduce the cost and redundancy of research, and compatible with the highest standards of reliability in science.
