The Construction of a Multi-User Data Base on the Attributes of U.S. Courts of Appeals Judges, 1891-1992

这个项目的主要目标是建立一个明确的、多用户的数据库，包括1891年（这一级法院的开始）到1992年任职的美国上诉法院法官的个人、社会、经济、职业和政治属性。我们知道，不同政党的总统通常有不同的国内议程，来自南方的民主党议员的投票结果往往与该地区以外的议员不同，而大众的政治行为与社会和经济特征有关。我们不太了解这些因素在多大程度上影响上诉法官的投票（司法决定）倾向。事实上，由于缺乏全面和可靠的数据库，关于法官为何如此投票的综合理论的发展一直受到阻碍。这类信息是为最高法院法官收集的，但这是第一个将数据收集扩展到数量多得多的联邦上诉法官的项目。该项目将收集联邦上诉法官的必要数据，然后以用户友好的形式提供给学术界。构建的数据库将包括每位法官的以下信息：任命的主席、前任（如果有的话）、宗教、党派、教育程度、出生日期和地点、居住州、任命时的年龄、以前的职位（按时间顺序）、性别、种族、民族、A.B.A.评级（因为这些已经可用），以及离开法官职位的时间和原因。正在完成一个关于案件特征和投票的补充数据库；这两个数据集将包括每个法官的唯一识别号码，从而允许将两者合并用于适当的研究项目。合并后的多用户数据库将使学术界能够进行迄今为止不可能进行的重要研究。* * *

9311999 BARROW The primary objective of this project is construction of a definitive, multi-user data base on the personal, social, economic, career and political attributes of U.S. Courts of Appeals judges who served from 1891 (the inception of this level of court) through 1992. We know the presidents of different political parties generally have different domestic agendas, that Democratic legislators from the South often vote differently from their counterparts outside that region, and that mass political behavior is related to social and economic characteristics. We are less informed about the extent to which these factors influence the voting (judicial decision) tendencies of appellate judges. Indeed, development of integrated theories about why judges vote as they do has been impeded by the lack of a comprehensive and reliable data base. This type of information has been assembled for Supreme Court Justices, but this is the first project to extend the data collection to the far larger number of federal appellate judges. The project will assemble the requisite data on federal appellate judges and then make them available to the scholarly community in a user-friendly format. The constructed data base will include the following information for each judge: appointing president, predecessor (if there was one), religion, party affiliation, education, date and place of birth, state of residence, age at time of appointment, previous positions held (in temporal sequence), gender, race, ethnicity, A.B.A. rating (since these have been available), and the timing and reason for leaving the bench. A complementary data base on case characteristics and votes is being completed; both data sets will include a unique identification number for each judge, thereby permitting the merger of the two for appropriate research projects. The merged multi-user data base will allow the scholarly community to pursue important lines of research that heretofore were impossible. * **