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United States Supreme Court Judicial Database, Phase II: 1953-1993

Metadata Updated: March 12, 2025

The purpose of this data collection was to record information about the cases, litigants, amicus participants, and the opinions decided by the Supreme Court under the tenure of Chief Justices Earl Warren (1953-1969) and Warren Burger (1969-1986) and others through 1993. The approach of this study was to proceed deductively, rather than seek to infer values of a particular group of justices. This method allows the investigation of value conflicts that are not litigated, as well as the value conflicts represented in Supreme Court opinions. Opinions are coded on the basis of their literal content, and the data are organized around the opinions. There are eight types of opinions. Within each type, up to six topics are coded, and within each topic, up to two values are coded. There are three integrated parts to this study, each of which can be linked to the other files by specific variables. Part 1, Supreme Court Database, contains basic case attributes from UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT JUDICIAL DATABASE, 1953-1993 TERMS (ICPSR 9422) and the opinions given in the cases. Part 2, Briefs, gives information on the filers and co-filers for cases in which amicus curie briefs were filed. Part 3, Groups, lists the litigants' names. The distinct aspects of the Court's decisions are covered by six types of variables in Part 1: (1) identification variables including case citation, docket number, unit of analysis, and number of records per unit of analysis, (2) background variables offering information on origin of case, source of case, reason for granting cert, parties to the case, direction of the lower court's decision, and manner in which the Court takes jurisdiction, (3) chronological variables covering date of term of court, chief justice, and natural court, (4) substantive variables including multiple legal provisions, authority for decision, issue, issue areas, and direction of decision, (5) outcome variables supplying information on form of decision, disposition of case, winning party, declaration of unconstitutionality, and multiple memorandum decisions, and (6) voting and opinion variables pertaining to the vote in the case and to the direction of the individual justices' votes.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: us-pd

Collection

This dataset is part of the following collection:

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date August 18, 2021
Metadata Updated Date March 12, 2025

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOJ JSON

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date August 18, 2021
Metadata Updated Date March 12, 2025
Publisher Bureau of Justice Statistics
Maintainer
Identifier 2237
Data First Published 1997-12-11T00:00:00
Language eng
Data Last Modified 2006-03-30T00:00:00
Public Access Level public
Aicategory Not AI-ready
Bureau Code 011:21
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://www.justice.gov/data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Collection Package Id f031701b-0a00-4bc6-8bea-99db61e0c8e8
Harvest Object Id 8808a578-c9e9-4d9f-9b97-6013e6d09bf0
Harvest Source Id 3290e90a-116f-42fc-86ac-e65521ef3b68
Harvest Source Title DOJ JSON
Internalcontactpoint {"@type": "vcard:Contact", "fn": "Ask BJS Bureau of Justice Statistics (USDOJ)", "hasEmail": "mailto:askbjs@usdoj.gov"}
Jcamsystem {"acronym": "OJP_EXT", "id": 8, "name": "External system not available in CSAM"}
License http://www.usa.gov/publicdomain/label/1.0/
Metadatamodified 9/2/2022 6:21:00 PM
Program Code 011:061
Publisher Hierarchy Office of Justice Programs > Bureau of Justice Statistics
Sourceidentifier https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR06987
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash ff5b0174ca3cd31b6e5cde4988d756b554cfd6d8648c7053c50d2f3710098865
Source Schema Version 1.1

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