Collaborative Proposal: Understanding Supreme Court Decision-making Through Conference Note Transcription

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U.S. Supreme Court justices cast votes in complete secrecy during weekly meetings, which only justices are allowed to attend. During these meetings, the justices discuss, deliberate, and make initial decisions on cases they have heard. The written notes the justices themselves take during these meetings provide the only record of what has been said, and by whom. This project will gather these notes from archives across the country, utilize the power of citizen-scientists to transcribe them, and, most importantly, publish them online in an archive of searchable text documents that will be widely disseminated to researchers, teachers, journalists, lawyers, and the public. The resulting data will include almost 45,000 digital documents spanning 49 years, 6900 cases, and approximately 10 million words. To transcribe these documents the project utilizes Zooniverse, an NSF funded web-based platform that engages the public in crowd-sourced scientific research projects. This project therefore directly involves the public in social scientific research, which will enhance citizen understanding of social science generally and of the inner workings of the U.S. Supreme Court specifically. These data will be immediately accessible to a diverse range of audiences. Researchers will be able to apply text analysis techniques to the computer-readable text files. Lawyers, teachers, journalists, and the general public will be able to easily use the online archive to explore and learn from what was said by justices during their secret conference discussions. Ultimately, these data will reveal the inner workings of the most secretive aspect of the federal government?s most secretive institution, the U.S. Supreme Court. In so doing, this project will fundamentally transform scholarly understanding of how the Court sets national legal policy.