U.S. Supreme Court Expands Transparency

Supreme Court Database To Be Expanded

The Connecticut Law Tribune - November 6, 2009

A group of law schools will help expand an online U.S. Supreme Court database so that it reaches back to the court's first recorded decision in 1792. The schools received an $874,000 National Science Foundation grant in September to begin the four-year project, which will add 19,675 cases to a database that now extends from 1953 through 2008, said Lee Epstein, a professor at Northwestern University School of Law. The group will post 4,400 cases by next summer and add more in installments each year. “There's a lot of interest in the history of the court and lots of people write about the court, and now they're going to have an empirical foundation,” Epstein said. Harold Spaeth, professor emeritus at Michigan State University, created the database during the 1980s for scholarly research. The schools redesigned it last year with updated technology to make it more user-friendly for non-academics. CLICK HERE TO SEE THE DATABASE or CLICK HERE