Supreme Court Citation Network Data

Developed by
James H. Fowler and Sangick Jeon

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

• The Authority of Supreme Court Precedent
  James H. Fowler, Sangick Jeon
  Social Networks 30 (1): 16-30 (January 2008)
    (Featured in The Economist)

• 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, Paul J. Wahlbeck
  Political Analysis, 15 (3): 324-346 (July 2007)

These papers describe basic features of the data and how it was retrieved and processed.

DATA FILES TO REPLICATE RESULTS IN SOCIAL NETWORKS ARTICLE

A zipped copy of all files is available here.

• The judicial.csv file is an aggregate results file, including ranks of case authority and hub scores. 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 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.

DATA FILES TO REPLICATE RESULTS IN POLITICAL ANALYSIS ARTICLE

There are two files.

• The Pol_Analysis_ussc_cites.csv.zip file contains a list of all 202,167 citations from USSC majority opinions (the citing case) to USSC majority opinions (the cited case). Lexis IDs are used, but can be converted to USIDs with the second file.

• The Pol_Analysis_replication.zip file is a Stata file that contains a list of all 2,434,607 case-year observations and includes the following variables:

  name	name of each case
  usid	US Reporter id
  lexid	Lexis id
  amiciz.num	standardized number of amici briefs filed
  auth.num	inward importance score
  hub.num	outward importance score
  oxford.num	does case appear in Oxford Guide's list of important cases?
  cq.num	does case appear in Congressional Quarterly's list of important cases?
  nyt.num	did case appear on front page of New York Times?
  insc.num	number of cites from USSC to case in current year
  apin.num	number of cites from Appeals Courts to case in current year
  stin.num	number of cites from State Courts to case in current year
  citedyr.num	year case was issued
  citingyr.num	current year
  size.num	number of cases in the network in the current year
  age	age of case
  age.sq	square of age of case
  insc.num.lag	number of cites from USSC to case in previous year
  apin.num.lag	number of cites from Appeals Courts to case in previous year
  stin.num.lag	number of cites from State Courts to case in previous year
  poutevcent.num.lag	percentile rank outward eigenvector centrality of case in previous year
  pinevcent.num.lag	percentile rank inward eigenvector centrality of case in previous year
  phub.num.lag	percentile rank outward importance score in previous year
  pauth.num.lag	percentile rank inward importance score in previous year
  outsc.num.lag	number of cites to other USSC majority opinions
  sc.cumul.cites.lag	cumulative number of cites from USSC to case up to current year

This work by James H. Fowler is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License