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The Collection The Contributors
Primary Investigators
Harold Spaeth
Michigan State University College of Law
Harold Spaeth is Research Professor of Law at Michigan State University College of Law and Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Michigan State. With support from the National Science Foundation, he created the first U.S. Supreme Court Database, and has maintained it ever since. As a pioneer in the field of Judicial Behavior, Professor Spaeth has received numerous awards and honors—including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association. He is co-author of the The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisisted, the original edition of which won the Wadsworth Award for a book that has made a lasting influence on the field of law and courts. Professor Spaeth is a past President of the Midwest Political Science Association.

Washington University in St. Louis
Lee Epstein is the Ethan A.H. Shepley Distinguished University Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science. A recipient of ten grants from the National Science Foundation for her work on law and legal institutions, Epstein has also authored, co-authored, or edited over 100 articles and essays, as well as 14 books, including the Constitutional Law for a Changing America series (winner of the Teaching and Mentoring Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association), The Supreme Court Compendium (winner of an Outstanding Academic Book Award from Choice), and The Choices Justices Make (recipient of the Pritchett award for the Best Book on Law and Courts). Professor Epstein is a former chair of the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association and a past President of the Midwest Political Science Association. She is a Co-Editor of the Journal of Law, Economics & Organization.

University of Pennsylvania School of Law
Theodore Ruger joined the Penn Laws faculty in July 2004 after three years at Washington University in St. Louis. Professor Ruger's scholarship has endeavored to bring fresh insight to the study of some of the oldest questions of American constitutional law—namely; the theoretical justifications for, and empirical contours of, the application of judicial authority. In exploring these issues Professor Ruger supplements traditional legal analysis with the methods of other disciplines, including history and political science. His work has appeared in sources such as the Harvard Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, the Northwestern Law Review, and as the centerpiece of a symposium in Perspectives on Politics, a leading peer-reviewed political science journal. In addition to his interests in constitutional law and legislation, Professor Ruger also teaches and writes in the area of health law and pharmaceutical regulation. His current research in that field draws on his broader work on judicial power, and addresses the manner in which American courts—and particularly the United States Supreme Court—have shaped the field of health law in recent decades.

Stony Brook University Department of Political Science
coStony Jeffrey A. Segal is SUNY Distinguished Professor and chair of the political science department at Stony Brook University. He has also served as Global Research Fellow at the Hauser Global Law School Program at the NYU School of Law and as a Fellow in the Law and Social Sciences Program at Northwestern University. He has a Ph.D. in political science from Michigan State University (1983). He is co-author of seven books, including Majority Rule or Minority Will: Adherence to Precedent on the U.S. Supreme Court (Cambridge 1999, with Harold Spaeth) which won the C. Herman Pritchett Award for best book in law and judicial politics, and The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model (Cambridge 1993, also with Harold Spaeth) which won the Wadsworth Award (2005), for book or article, ten years or older, that has had a lasting influence on the field of law and courts. His articles include "Predicting Supreme Court Cases Probabilistically: The Search and Seizure Cases, 1962-1981" (American Political Science Review, 1984), which also won the Wadsworth Award (2002) for lasting influence. His article "The Supreme Court During Crisis" (NYU Law Review, 2005, with Lee Epstein, Daniel Ho, and Gary King) won the McGraw-Hill Award (2006) for best article published by political scientists on law and courts. Segal has served on the Board of the Law and Social Sciences Program at the NSF and as President of the Midwest Political Science Association.

University of Michigan Department of Political Science
Andrew D. Martin is Dean of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts and Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Dean Martin specializes in political methodology, Bayesian statistics, and American political institutions. Much of his substantive research focuses on law and courts, particularly the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts. He has written for a number of prominent law reviews and leading social science and applied statistics journals. Dean Martin's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. He was elected as a Fellow of the Society for Political Methodology in 2012.

University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee Department of Political Science
Sara C. Benesh is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, where she teaches courses on judicial politics, civil liberties, political methodology, and American government. Sara's work on circuit court decision making, the judicial hierarchy, Supreme Court decision making, and legitimacy has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, American Politics Research, Justice System Journal, and Judicature, among others, and her JOP paper on the legitimacy of lower courts won the Houghton-Mifflin Award for best published paper in Law and Courts. She is also author of a book on confessions and co-author of The Supreme Court in the American Legal System, with Harold Spaeth and Jeffrey Segal. Sara was co-PI on the NSF-sponsored Justice Centered Database (an extension of the Spaeth Database). She received her PhD in 1999 from Michigan State University, under the direction of Spaeth.



Supplemental Participants
Grant Support
National Science Foundation
nsf The National Science Foundation has made this initiative possible and without its support the collection and its modernized interface would not be available.
  • SES-0921869, SES-0923665, SES-0919149, and SES-0918613. "Collaborative Research: Backdating the U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Database"
  • SES-0751966 "Updating and Backdating the U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Database"
  • SES-9910535 "Collaborative Research: Individual-Level Analysis of Supreme Court Justices: A Modification to the United States Supreme Court Judicial Databases"
  • SES-9614000 "Collaborative Research to Extend the Expanded Version of the U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Data Base: The Burger Court Years"
  • SES-9211452 "Collaborative Research: Expansion of the U.S. Supreme Court Data Base"
  • SES-8313773 "U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Data Base"


U.S. Reports
HeinOnline
heinonline HeinOnline has generously provided high-quality, OCRed PDF files of the U.S. Reports from Volumes 1 through 346 (1754-1952). These files have been useful as we undertake our back-dating project.

Technology Design and Development
Center for Empirical Research in the Law
cerl The Center for Empirical Research in the Law at Washington University in St. Louis provides the technology infrastructure for this project. CERL supports empirical research of law and legal institutions through collaborations with faculty, students, and other institutions. CERL Research Technologist Troy DeArmitt is responsible for the design and web development of both the public and administrative websites as well as the underlying database technology. This site is hosted on CERL-administered servers.

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The Collection The Contributors
image The Supreme Court Database has been generously supported by the National Science Foundation. Creative Commons License

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