| --- |
| license: cc-by-nc-3.0 |
| task_categories: |
| - tabular-classification |
| - tabular-regression |
| tags: |
| - supreme-court |
| - courts |
| - judicial-politics |
| - scdb |
| - law |
| - duckdb |
| - datapond |
| pretty_name: The Supreme Court Database (SCDB), 1791-present, case- and justice-level with the code book |
| size_categories: |
| - 100K<n<1M |
| --- |
| |
| # Supreme Court Database (SCDB) |
|
|
| Every U.S. Supreme Court decision 1791-present from Washington University's Supreme Court |
| Database: the modern (1946-, release 2026_01) and Legacy (1791-1945) databases at the case |
| and justice level, all four units of analysis, plus the complete online code book as a |
| `codes` table so every integer code decodes in SQL. `v_cases` is pre-decoded. |
| **677,452 rows across 9 tables.** |
|
|
| | Table | Description | Row Count | Column Count | |
| |---|---|---|---| |
| | `justice_votes` | One row per justice per case, 1791-present: the case variables plus the justice's vote, opinion, direction, majority and agreement | 256,469 | 62 | |
| | `justice_votes_vote` | Justice-level rows of cases_vote (1946-present) | 126,237 | 62 | |
| | `justice_votes_legal_provision` | Justice-level rows of cases_legal_provision (1946-present) | 125,571 | 62 | |
| | `justice_votes_docket` | Justice-level rows of cases_docket (1946-present) | 97,918 | 62 | |
| | `cases` | One row per Supreme Court case by citation, 1791-present (modern 1946+ release 2026_01 plus the Legacy database): dates, citations, parties, origin, issue, decision direction, disposition, vote counts, opinion writer | 29,270 | 54 | |
| | `cases_vote` | Modern cases split one row per issue/vote split (1946-present) | 14,090 | 54 | |
| | `cases_legal_provision` | Modern cases split one row per legal provision considered (1946-present) | 14,016 | 54 | |
| | `cases_docket` | Modern cases split one row per docket number consolidated in the decision (1946-present) | 10,932 | 54 | |
| | `codes` | SCDB online code book: the label for every coded value (variable, code, label; justices carry their service dates in extra) | 2,949 | 4 | |
|
|
| ## Query it remotely |
|
|
| ```sql |
| INSTALL httpfs; LOAD httpfs; |
| ATTACH 'https://huggingface.co/datasets/Nason/scdb-database/resolve/main/scdb.duckdb' AS scdb (READ_ONLY); |
| |
| SELECT term, decision_direction, COUNT(*) AS n |
| FROM scdb.v_cases WHERE term >= 2015 GROUP BY 1, 2 ORDER BY 1, 2; |
| ``` |
|
|
| Or with the datapond packages: `pip install datapond` / `pak::pak("datapond-db/datapond-r")`. |
|
|
| Build pipeline and caveats: https://github.com/ian-nason/scdb-database |
| Source: http://scdb.wustl.edu (Spaeth, Epstein et al.; CC BY-NC 3.0 - cite the SCDB). |
|
|
