Understanding Supreme Court Decision-Making Through Justices’ Personal Conference Notes: An Update on the SCOTUSNOTES Project

Abstract

Vol. 36:2Several years ago, the National Science Foundation funded our project to collect Supreme Court conference notes, examine them, and provide researchers with the images and transcriptions of those records. The work is time-consuming and resource-intensive but quite promising. In this short article, we explain the project and our efforts toward it. We undertake three specific tasks. First, we give an overview of the data, explaining whose conference notes we examine and what those notes capture. Second, we share some preliminary insights those data have revealed. Though we are in throes of cleaning the completed transcriptions, already the data have revealed several fascinating substantive insights, spurred novel questions, and cast telling shadows on older questions. Third, we discuss where we hope to go from here, exploring where we (and you) might take this treasure trove of data