The Institutional Foundations of Judicial Independence

州最高法院是许多州管辖领域的重要最终决策者，包括家庭、许多商业纠纷和刑法。其次，长期以来，学术界普遍认为，法院不倾向于反对占主导地位的政治联盟或掌权高管的重大公共政策倡议。我们对这些机制知之甚少，也不知道司法遴选方法是否重要，或者公众舆论是否似乎影响决策。随着时间的推移，我们也几乎没有系统的证据来说明这些州的最终法院做了什么，或者决定是如何受到公众舆论或司法遴选方法的影响的。虽然已经汇编了一些数据库，但它们是手工编码的。机器学习的进步使我们能够对案件的主题和日期进行编码，比我们目前拥有的案件数量要多得多。这个项目将产生的案例数据库将对许多学者有用。为州最高法院的裁决开发网络抓取软件工具是该领域的一项重大创新，允许对比学者目前可用的更广泛的案例进行编码。与人类编码员一起检查机器编码的计划将允许对这些新工具进行评估。该项目将能够评估法院随时间发生的变化以及对司法判决的影响，其方式依赖于衡量民意和司法判决的最新方法。

The state courts of last resort are significant final decisionmakers in many areas states govern, including family, many business disputes, and criminal law. Second, it has long been a matter of common scholarly wisdom that courts do not tend to go against dominant political coalitions or major public policy initiatives of executives who are in power. We have little understanding of the mechanisms, and whether judicial selection methods matter or whether public opinion seems to influence decisions. We also have little systematic evidence over time about what these state courts of last resort do, or how decisions are influenced by public opinion or methods of judicial selection. While some databases have been assembled, they have been coded by hand. Advances in machine learning allow coding of cases for subject matter and date of a much larger number of cases than we currently have available. The database of cases this project will generate will be useful to many scholars.The development of web-scraping software tools for state court of last resort decisions is a significant innovation in the field, allowing coding of a much broader range of cases than have currently been available to scholars. The plan to check machine coding with human coders will allow assessment of these new tools. This project will allow assessing change over time in courts and influences on judicial decisions in a way that relies on the most current methodologies regarding measuring public opinion and judicial decisions.