Supreme Court Citation Network Data

Developed by
James H. Fowler
University of California, San Diego
and
Sangick Jeon, Stanford
email: jhfowler@ucsd.edu

This page contains links to data on citations in the U.S. Supreme Court from the U.S. Reports for 1754 to 2002. We have spent a lot of time developing this data so if you want to use it please cite the following paper:

    * The Authority of Supreme Court Precedent: A Network Analysis, James H. Fowler and Sangick Jeon Social Networks forthcoming
      (mentioned in The Economist) 

This paper describes basic features of the data and how it was retrieved and processed. Because it is a very large data set there will inevitably be some mistakes in it.

For a related paper using a different data set, please see:

    * Network Analysis and the Law: Measuring the Legal Importance of Supreme Court Precedents, James H. Fowler, Timothy R. Johnson, James F. Spriggs II, Sangick Jeon, and Paul J. Wahlbeck, Political Analysis, forthcoming 

DATA FILES

A zipped copy of all files is available here.

    * The judicial.csv file is an aggregate results file. It is comma delimited and here's a quick key:

      caseid 	unique numerical id given to each case
      usid	US Reporter id (or numerical equivalent for early Reporters)
      parties	parties to case
      overruled	if case was overruled, the caseid of the overruling case is shown
      overruling   	if case overruled other case(s), the overruled caseids are shown
      oxford	Does case appear on Oxford list of salient cases?
      liihc	Does case appear on Legal Information Institute's list of important cases?
      indeg	number of cases that cite this case (as of 2002)
      outdeg	number of cases this case cites
      hub	raw hub score (measures how well grounded the case is in the law)
      hubrank	rank of hub score
      auth	raw authority score
      authrank	rank of authority score
      between	betweeness measure
      incent	eigenvector centrality measure

    * The allcites.txt file contains all citations. The first column indicates the caseid of the citing case and the second column indicates the caseid of the citedcase. The columns are space delimited. 

The next four files are all matrices of 30288 cases x 203 years (1800-2002). E.g. the element 5,10 is an observation for the case with caseid=5 in 1809.

    * The indegmat.txt file identifies the inward citation count for each case in each year.

    * The outdegmat.txt file identifies the outward citation count for each case in each year. Notice that outward citations never change once a case comes into existence.

    * The authmat.txt file identifies the authority score for each case in each year.

    * The hubmat.txt file identifies the hub score for each case in each year. Notice that hub scores can change from year to year since the authority of cited precedents can change over time. 

Last Updated 15 May 2007
Copyright © 1998-2007 James Fowler, All Rights Reserved.