Collaborative Research: Expansion of the U.S. Supreme CourtData Base

美国最高法院的决策对社会科学家、记者和门外汉都有很大的影响。从1983年开始，法律和社会科学方案为建立一个多用户数据库提供了支持，该数据库将与最高法院决策有关的广泛方面编纂成法典，并通过密歇根州安娜堡的大学间政治和社会研究联盟向社会科学家和其他各方提供这些数据。这笔赠款将扩大数据库，从而加强最高法院的学术研究。具体地说，这个与最初项目的首席调查员Spaeth和Jan Palmer合作的项目将扩展NSF资助的美国最高法院司法数据库(现在涵盖沃伦、汉堡和伦奎斯特三个年份)，以包含文森法院(1946-1953)官方投票的可比数据。第二个扩展将与官方投票相关的数据与Palmer创建的包含大法官会议投票和意见分配的数据库相结合。这个数据库包括文森法院，将扩大到包括沃伦法院。由此产生的项目将涵盖最高法院23届任期(1946-1968)以及当时任职的20名大法官的行为。与原始数据库一样，这些扩展将在大学间联盟存档，并将作为SPSS输出文件提供。由此产生的数据的丰富性将极大地促进关于最高法院的理论的制定和假设的检验。

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 Spaeth, the principal investigator of the original project, and Jan Palmer 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 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.