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Online Database of SCOTUS Decisions


The Washington University School of Law has posted an online database of decisions by the Supreme Court of the United States. An updated version of the database was released in August 2018. There is a case centered and a justice centered version of the database. The database contains 200 hundred data points for each decision issued since 1791. It's split into two parts: The modern database has decisions issued since 1946; the legacy version covers 1791 to 1945. The data can be downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet. It was formerly known as the Spaeth database.

Alternate forms of the database are posted with a row for each legal citation, each case docket, or each issue. The spreadsheet makes use of numeric codes, which are listed in the Codebook posted here.

In this example, I've filtered the spreadsheet by the code for Miranda warnings, 10100

There are other numeric codes for individual justices; the particular Article, Section, Paragraphs, and Amendments of the Constitution at issue; the court which is the source of the case; and several other fields.

You can search an online version of the database here. It presents the collected data for each case.


Sean O'Shea has more than 20 years of experience in the litigation support field with major law firms in New York and San Francisco.   He is an ACEDS Certified eDiscovery Specialist and a Relativity Certified Administrator.

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The views expressed in this blog are those of the owner and do not reflect the views or opinions of the owner’s employer.

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