Collaborative Research: The U.S. Supreme Court Justices Database

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The National Science Foundation has funded several comprehensive multi-user databases on the attributes of judges who have served on the U.S. Courts of Appeals and District Courts. No precise analog exists for the U.S. Supreme Court. The only existing electronic database on justices of the Supreme Court (United States Supreme Court Justices Biographical Data, 1789-1958) does not include any justices appointed or nominated after 1958 and, owing to various other limitations, is far less informative and useful to researchers than the existing lower court data bases.The proposal fills this void by creating a multi-user, public database containing a wealth of information on individuals nominated (whether confirmed or not) to the U.S. Supreme Court. Specifically, the database will include 238 variables, falling roughly into 5 categories: identifiers, background characteristics and personal attributes, nominations, service on the Court, and departures from the bench. The PI's will announce its completion on pertinent listservs, archive it with the ICPSR, as well as on various web sites. It will be available in multiple electronic forms (as SPSS, Stata, ASCII, and Excel files) and in several formats (one, largely alpha; the other, largely numeric) thereby increasing its accessibility to scholarly, policy, and journalistic communities.