From Schubert’s Judicial Mind to Spaeth’s U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Data Base

Published in 1998. American Journal of Political Science 42 (July): 1012-1019.

Paul Djupe
Lee Epstein

Judicial specialists have been rather inactive participants in contemporary debates over the replication and verification of data. In part, this reflects the fact that they have already developed data sets (e.g., Spaeth's U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Data Base) designed to meet these concerns. But such was not always the case: Many of the foundational studies in the field relied on information that would not pass muster under current standards governing data collection. We crossvalidate a model from one of these studies (Epstein, Walker, and Dixon 1989), which largely relied on data collected by Schubert (1976), with data derived from the Spaeth Data Base.

Click here for for the article (.pdf). The data we used in the article are below.