U.S. Supreme Court Deliberations and Quantitative Data on Unreasoned Judgments

United States Supreme Court archival materials and quantitative datasets collected for research on unreasoned judgments. The data includes draft opinions, memos, and letters from justices' papers archived at the Library of Congress, alongside Stata datasets for statistical replication. Matthew Hitt compiled this data, resulting in publications in 2016 and 2019.

Use Cases

• Replicate statistical analyses on unreasoned judgments based on the quantitative datasets mentioned.
• Analyze justices' deliberation patterns based on archival materials like draft opinions and memos.
• Study the evolution of the Supreme Court's goals from dispute resolution to doctrinal consistency as described in the project.
• Investigate the frequency and consequences of unreasoned judgments in American law as outlined in the research questions.

Strengths

• Includes primary source archival materials from justices' papers at the Library of Congress.
• Data is organized to replicate analyses from two published academic works (2016 and 2019).
• Materials are categorized by case and justice, and quantitative datasets are organized by book chapter.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and file size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.

Provenance

Source

Matthew Hitt, via QDR Harvested Dataverse.

Collection Method

Materials collected from justices' papers archived at the Library of Congress.

Freshness

Last updated 2025-10-20 20:00:39; freshness should be verified.

Geography

United States Supreme Court.