Historic Supreme Court voting records
June 24, 2014 2:02 PM   Subscribe

I'd like to have a list of every US Supreme Court decision ever, including which justices voted how. I'd like the list to be easily parsable by a computer program. Details and alternatively acceptable things inside.

I don't care about the details of the cases or anything like that; the only information I'm interested in is like "In case Good v. Evil, Justices Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia, and Kennedy ruled in favor of Evil; Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan ruled in favor of Good".

If I can't get a list of every decision ever, but I can get a list of every decision for some smaller subset or subsets of time, I'd be interested in hearing about that too.

If I can't get a list that's easily parsable by a computer program, but I can get a list, I'm interested in hearing about that too.
posted by Flunkie to Law & Government (3 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: The Supreme Court Database includes a dataset with individual justices' votes, in CSV format. I have not used this database professionally so I can't guarantee that it's easily usable, but it exists.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 2:08 PM on June 24, 2014 [1 favorite]


And it's not going to be quite so easy to parse cases with partial concurrences and dissents, for instance the most recent EPA ruling:
Scalia, J., announced the judgment of the Court and delivered an opinion, Parts I and II of which were for the Court. Roberts, C. J., and Kennedy, J., joined that opinion in full; Thomas and Alito, JJ., joined as to Parts I, II-A, and II-B-1; and Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, JJ., joined as to Part II-B-2. Breyer J., filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, in which Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan, JJ., joined. Alito, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, in which Thomas, J., joined.
posted by holgate at 2:14 PM on June 24, 2014 [3 favorites]


What holgate said.

For example, in the Halliburton decision earlier this week, the opinion of the Court was 9-0. But the real action was in the concurrences: three liberal justices emphasized that the Court's opinion, to the extent it changed existing law about certifying securities class actions, did so only minimally. And three conservative justices concurred in the Court's opinion because it made it slightly more difficult to certify securities class actions, but wrote separately to say that they would have gone further and made it far more difficult to certify a securities class action.
posted by ewiar at 6:06 PM on June 24, 2014


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