The decision-making of the United States Supreme Court is of substantial interest to social scientists, journalists, and laypersons alike. Beginning in 1983, the Law and Social Science Program provided support for the construction of a multi-user data base that codifies a wide range of dimensions relevant to Supreme Court decision-making, and makes these data available to social scientists and other parties through the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This grant will extend the data base and therefore, enhance scholarship on the Supreme Court. Specifically, this collaborative project with Harold Spaeth, the principal investigator of the original project, will extend the NSF-funded U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Data Base (now covering the Warren, Burger and Rehnquist years) to encompass comparable data on the official votes of the Vinson Court (1946-1953). A second extension integrates data related to the official votes with a data base created by Jan Palmer that contains the justices' conference voting and opinion assignments. This data base, which encompasses the Vinson Court, will be extended to include the Warren Court. The resulting project will span 23 terms of the Supreme Court (1946-1968) and the behavior of the 20 justices who then served. As with the original data base, these extensions will be archived at the Inter-University Consortium, and will be available as an SPSS export file. The richness of the resulting data will tremendously enhance the formulation of theory and testing of hypotheses with respect to the Supreme Court.
