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Databases for Researching the Supreme Court

JSTOR
Archival and current issues of scholarly journals and ebooks across more than 60 academic disciplines.
America: History & Life with Full Text
Database of literature covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present. With selective indexing for 1,700 journals from 1955 to present, America: History & Life with Full Text also provides full-text coverage of more than 200 journals and nearly 100 books.
Worldwide Political Science Abstracts
This database provides abstracts and indexing of the international literature of political science and international relations, along with complementary fields, including international law and public administration/policy. The database provides abstracts of journal articles and citations to book reviews drawn from over 1,500+ serials publications and also provides abstracts of books, book chapters, dissertations and working papers.
Academic Search Complete
Academic Search Complete is a comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full-text database, with more than 7,000 full-text periodicals, including nearly 6,000 peer-reviewed journals. In addition to full text, this database offers indexing and abstracts for more than 11,000 journals and a total of more than 11,600 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc. The database features PDF content going back as far as 1887, with the majority of full text titles in native (searchable) PDF format. Searchable cited references are provided for more than 1,000 journals.
HeinOnline
Offers extensive access to legal and government materials. Includes Federal Register, U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Reports, state session laws, and more. Explore HeinOnline Subject Guides
Westlaw Campus Research
Comprehensive database of legal materials, including cases, statutes, and regulations of the U.S. government and the various state governments; includes the legal encyclopedia American Jurisprudence 2nd and American Law Reports; case law from 1789 to present; current statutes and regulations.

Supreme Court Database
The Supreme Court Database is the definitive source for researchers, students, journalists, and citizens interested in the U.S. Supreme Court. The Database contains over two hundred pieces of information about each case decided by the Court between the 1791 and 2021 terms.

ProQuest Congressional
ProQuest Congressional provides access to historical and current Congressional information and publications on all aspects of legislation dealing with life and public policy. Topics include scientific undertakings, historical events, social welfare, economic conditions, communication policies, and an endless array of other subjects.
The database indexes and provides full-text for Congressional Committee Prints, House and Senate Documents and Reports (Congressional Serial Set), Hearings, and Legislative Histories. It also provides member and committee information and political news, as well as access to the Code of Federal Regulations, Federal Register, and the Congressional Record (1985-present).
GovInfo
Free public access to official publications from all three branches of the Federal Government.

Highlighted books from the collection

The Supreme Court: An Essential History by Peter Charles Hoffer; Williamjames Hull Hoffer; N. E. H. Hull
ISBN: 0700626832
Publication Date: 2018-09-28
The Supreme Court chronicles an institution that dramatically evolved from six men meeting in borrowed quarters to the most closely watched tribunal in the world. Underscoring the close connection between law and politics, the authors highlight essential issues, cases, and decisions within the context of the times in which the decisions were handed down. Deftly combining doctrine and judicial biography with case law, they demonstrate how the justices have shaped the law and how the law that the Court makes has shaped our nation, with an emphasis on how the Court responded--or failed to respond--to the plight of the underdog. Each chapter covers the Court's years under a specific Chief Justice, focusing on cases that are the most reflective of the way the Court saw the law and the world and that had the most impact on the lives of ordinary Americans.
Persuading the Supreme Court: the significance of briefs in judicial decision-making by Morgan L. W. Hazelton; Rachael K. Hinkle
ISBN: 0700633642
Publication Date: 2022-09-02
Persuading the Supreme Court leverages the very written arguments submitted to the Court to shed light on both their construction and impact. Drawing on more than 25,000 party and amicus briefs led between 1984 and 2015 and the text of the related court opinions.It offers new evidence that the resource advantage enjoyed by some parties likely stems from both the ability of their experienced attorneys to craft excellent briefs and their reputations with the justices. The analyses also reveal that information operates differently in terms of influencing who wins and what policy is announced. Using those original interviews and quantitative analyses of a rich original dataset of tens of thousands of briefs, with measures built using sophisticated natural language processing tools, Hazelton and Hinkle investigate the factors that influence what information litigants and their attorneys provide to the Supreme Court and what the justices and their clerks do with that information in deciding cases that set legal policy for the entire country.
The Limits of Judicial Power by William Lasser
ISBN: 9780807842331
Publication Date: 1989-10-15
Lasser examines in detail four periods during which the Court was widely charged with overstepping its constitutional power: the late 1850s, with the Dred Scott case and its aftermath; the Reconstruction era; the New Deal era; and the years of the Warren and Burger Courts after 1954. His thorough analysis of the most controversial decisions convincingly demonstrates that the Court has much more power to withstand political reprisal than is commonly assumed.
Feminist Judgments: rewritten opinions of the United States Supreme Court by Bridget J. Crawford (Editor); Linda L. Berger (Editor); Kathryn M. Stanchi (Editor)
ISBN: 9781107565609
Publication Date: 2016-08-02
What would United States Supreme Court opinions look like if key decisions on gender issues were written with a feminist perspective? Feminist Judgments brings together a group of scholars and lawyers to rewrite, using feminist reasoning, the most significant US Supreme Court cases on gender from the 1800s to the present day. The twenty-five opinions in this volume demonstrate that judges with feminist viewpoints could have changed the course of the law. The rewritten decisions reveal that previously accepted judicial outcomes were not necessary or inevitable and demonstrate that feminist reasoning increases the judicial capacity for justice. Feminist Judgments opens a path for a long overdue discussion of the real impact of judicial diversity on the law as well as the influence of perspective on judging.
How to Interpret the Constitution by Cass R. Sunstein
ISBN: 9780691252056
Publication Date: 2023-08-15
The U.S. Supreme Court has eliminated the right to abortion and is revisiting other fundamental questions today--about voting rights, affirmative action, gun laws, and much more. This book provides a lively introduction to competing approaches to interpreting the Constitution--and argues that the only way to choose one is to ask whether it would change American life for the better or worse. The Constitution doesn't contain instructions for its own interpretation. Any approach to constitutional interpretation needs to be defended in terms of its broad effects--what it does to our rights and our institutions. It must respect those rights and institutions--and safeguard the conditions for democracy itself.
Judicial Rhapsodies: Rhetoric and Fundamental Rights in the Supreme Court by Doug Coulson
ISBN: 9781943208463
Publication Date: 2023-02-28
All judges legitimize their decisions in writing, but US Supreme Court justices depend on public acceptance to a unique degree. Previous studies of judicial opinions have explored rhetorical strategies that produce legitimacy, but none have examined the laudatory, even operatic, forms of writing Supreme Court justices have used to justify fundamental rights decisions. Doug Coulson demonstrates that such "judicial rhapsodies" are not an aberration but a central feature of judicial discourse. First examining the classical origins of divisions between law and rhetoric, Coulson tracks what he calls an epideictic register--highly affective forms of expression that utilize hyperbole, amplification, and vocabularies of praise--through a surprising number of landmark Supreme Court opinions. Judicial Rhapsodies recovers and revalues these instances as significant to establishing and maintaining shared perspectives that form the basis for common experience and cooperation.

Political Science 417: Supreme Court

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Search in Search@UW

Find articles, UW books, digital collections & media

Databases for Researching the Supreme Court

Highlighted books from the collection