UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The U.S. Supreme Court Database, one of the nation’s leading research supports dedicated to the Supreme Court, has found a new home at Penn State University.
The comprehensive, publicly accessible database, containing information on every case decided by the Supreme Court from its first decision in 1791 to today, was sent to the Department of Political Science from Washington University in St. Louis (WashU), which has overseen it for many years. We have officially moved. Penn State College of Liberal Arts, Science.
Michael J. Nelson, department chair and professor of political science, was asked by Lee Epstein, WashU’s Ethan A.H. Shepley Distinguished Professor, to serve as principal investigator for the database.
Since its creation 40 years ago, the database has come to be considered “the backbone of all quantitative research on the Supreme Court,” Nelson said. The university will collaborate with the university’s McCourtney Institute for Democracy on research, education and advocacy activities, including: database.
“This is the record of political scientists who study the Supreme Court. We need information about every case, what cases are decided each term, how the justices vote,” Nelson said. spoke. “For me, it was important to continue to move databases forward because they have been so important to so much research over the decades. It’s going to be very good, and it’s great that it’s tied to the McCourtney Institute and the research that they’re doing. It should really contribute to the reputation of the department and the university.”
Clarence Lang, Susan Welch Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, said the database is a timely and important addition to the university’s research mission.
“As one of the foundational pillars of American democracy, the Supreme Court and its decisions demand rigorous scholarship and journalism, especially in the wake of the most significant cases of the past few years,” Lang said. said. “Given that, I am extremely excited and grateful that Michael Nelson and the Department of Political Science will be overseeing this important research institution for many years to come.”
The database was developed by political scientist Harold Speth at Michigan State University in the 1980s, and its data dates back to the 1950s. Nelson said Spaes did all the coding by hand on 3-by-5-inch notecards.
In the late 2000s, the database was migrated to WashU as part of a project funded by the National Science Foundation, incorporating all Supreme Court decisions dating back to the nation’s founding, and in the process making it more useful to scholars, students, and journalists. It has become. Nelson, then a graduate student, was part of the project team.
“They hired undergraduate students to stand in a copy room and literally copy pages and pages of these Supreme Court decisions, and then they sent them to Michigan State so Harold could code them,” Nelson said with a laugh. I remembered.
