For two decades now, virtually all systematic analysis of the contemporary Supreme Court and its members has relied on Harold J. Spaeth's U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Database. This holds for research conducted by social scientists and, increasingly, by legal academics; and it holds for quantitative and qualitative studies, as well as those more descriptive in nature. In fact, several inventories of peer-reviewed journals show that it is the rare article on the Court that derives its data from an alternative source. Monographs published by top presses also regularly rely on Database, and the many numerical studies of the Court receiving public attention in recent years have made liberal use of the data it houses. By the same token, journalists seeking to illuminate dimensions of the Court's work now regularly deploy it.
Spaeth's product, in short, has not just helped fill gaps in our knowledge. It is one of those rare creatures in the law and social science world: an invention that has substantially advanced a large area of study.
And yet, however invaluable the Database, it is now starting to show its age. Along these lines, we see several sets of issues but none more immediate than the simple fact that for many scholars and their students-not to mention policy makers and journalists-the Database is difficult to use. This is no fault of Spaeth's. When he created it, the desktop computing revolution had barely taken hold; the Internet did not exist. While Spaeth has not ignored these developments, his Database nonetheless continues to reflect its pre-micro-computing, pre-Internet origins, as any user can attest. Yet many scholars, policy makers, and journalists are not trained in the statistical programs necessary to use the current database, meaning that much worthwhile research may be thwarted unnecessarily. Moreover, even knowledge of the requisite software is insufficient. To conduct even simple analyses, users must understand the various identication variables as well.
Modern technology makes learning arcane variable names and values unnecessary; it also enables movement away from statistical software packages for those with little need to learn them.
It is this modern technology that we propose to attach to the Spaeth Database. Users will have easy access to all variables (with descriptive names) and quickly be able select the set of cases they desire to explore-whether a single decision or, say, all First Amendment disputes that were orally argued and resulted in a signed opinion. Graphs and tables will be straightforward to construct using this newly designed interface, and analyses-from the very basic to the more complex-intuitive to conduct. Users will be able to create accounts on the site to save case selections and the analyses they perform. Should they desire, downloading the entire database or subsets in various forms (SPSS, Stata, Excel) will also require no special skills.
Finally, recent changes in the availability of full-text Supreme Court opinions in open Internet sources will, with the help of the new interface, enable a broader set of users to engage in a hybrid method of research that will lend even greater power to the Database. Researchers will be able to use the Database to identify, sort, and assess a subgroup of cases corresponding to their relevant variable(s) of interest. But once that subset is assembled, the interface will provide direct links from their dataset to the full text Supreme Court opinions, which are freely available elsewhere on the Internet. This capability, unavailable with the current Database, will permit social scientists, law professors, and legal historians to identify relevant cases with systematic rigor, but then for particular projects to perform more nuanced analysis of the opinions themselves.
