Hall 9617190 This project will create a 50 state supreme court data base. These data will facilitate theoretically focused empirical studies that are essential to the progress of comparative judicial scholarship generally and state court research specifically. The data will combine state supreme court judge votes, case outcomes and case characte4ristics with judge attributes, institutional procedures and selected state contextual variables. Judicial scholarship heretofore has examined single states or 50 state studies at very high levels of aggregation. The result has been a compartmentalization of findings and a disjunction between micro and macro level explanations of judicial behavior and outcomes. This project will provide the systematic data that will hasten the development of theory that connects the law and judges with their institutional, political, and social contexts. These data will promote diverse theoretical efforts and rigorous methodological debates. Data will be archived at the ICPSR and a web page will be constructed to publicize the data and to facilitate the exchange of useful information among users. %%% This project will create a 50 state supreme court data base. These data will facilitate theoretically focused empirical studies that are essential to the progress of comparative judicial scholarship generally and state court research specifically. The data will combine state supreme court judge votes, case outcomes and case characte4ristics with judge attributes, institutional procedures and selected state contextual variables. Judicial scholarship heretofore has examined single states or 50 state studies at very high levels of aggregation. The result has been a compartmentalization of findings and a disjunction between micro and macro level explanations of judicial behavior and outcomes. This project will provide the systematic data that will hasten the development of theory that connects the law and judges with their institutional, political, and social co ntexts. These data will promote diverse theoretical efforts and rigorous methodological debates. Data will be archived at the ICPSR and a web page will be constructed to publicize the data and to ***
