Supplying new data on the U.S. Supreme Court's citation of legal scholarship under the Roberts Court from 2005 to 2023. It tracks a strong upward trend in citation counts and the percentage of opinions citing scholarship, with analysis of preferred journals and cited authors.
Use Cases
- Analyze the upward trend in citation counts to legal scholarship from 2005 to 2023 to model temporal influence patterns.
- Identify the percentage of opinions citing legal scholarship by year to assess adoption rates across the Court's docket.
- Examine citation distribution to elite law review journals like Harvard Law Review and Yale Law Journal for network analysis of academic influence.
- Profile the highly skewed distribution of cited law professors to study concentration of influence and associations with groups like the Federalist Society.
- Correlate citation frequency in salient decisions concerning gun rights, religious freedom, and affirmative action with case topics.
Strengths
- Covers a defined 19-year time range from 2005 to 2023 under the Roberts Court.
- Analyzes citations in recent landmark decisions such as Trump v. CASA (2025) and Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024).
- Identifies specific elite journal outlets like Harvard Law Review and Yale Law Journal as preferred citation sources.
Limitations
- Sample data and column structure are unavailable, limiting understanding of data granularity and variables.
- The dataset scope is limited to legal scholarship citations, excluding analysis of citations to other source types like case law or statutes.
- Potential bias towards analysis of salient decisions and elite journals as highlighted in the description.
Provenance
- Source
- Journal of Law and Courts Dataverse
- Collection Method
- Data collection on Supreme Court citations to legal scholarship in opinions, as described in the associated article.
- Time Range
- 2005 to 2023
- Freshness
- Last updated February 17, 2026.
- Geography
- United States