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Author’s Note: A number of scholars offered useful advice at various stages in the development
of this article. I am especially indebted to Lawrence Baum, Gregory Caldeira, Dennis Chong,
Jerry Goldman, Virginia Gray, Mark Hurwitz, Jeffrey Jenkins, Wesley Skogan, Clyde Wilcox,
and Christopher Zorn. In addition, I appreciate the insights and suggestions of the anonymous
reviewers. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Kevin T. McGuire,
Department of Political Science, Chapel Hill, NC 27599; e-mail: kmcguire@unc.edu.
1
Copyright 2008 by SAGE Publications.
policies. It turned out that the justices’ mandates were often met with resistance,
as many schools continued to read the Bible and lead students in
prayer, notwithstanding the Court’s clear pronouncements to the contrary
(see, for example, Birkby, 1966; Dolbeare & Hammond, 1971; Muir, 1967;
Way, 1968).
Of course, prayer in schools remains an issue of considerable public
salience, and surveys regularly show that large numbers of Americans
favor it. For example, a majority of Americans have disapproved of the
Court’s elimination of mandatory prayer for as long as survey researchers
have polled on this question.1 Not surprisingly, the issue has scarcely been
on the wane; cases involving prayer in schools have continued to belabor
the Court, as public schools have continued to search for creative mechanisms
to permit religious exercises without offending the Establishment
Clause. Judging by the Court’s decisions in this area, these efforts have
not been successful. Despite changes in the composition of the Court, its
consistent teaching has forbidden virtually any form of devotional practice
that communities have put into place.
How have public schools reacted to this stream of decisions? Do they
continue to resist more recent rulings, and if so, what explains that resistance?
Here I report findings from a survey of college undergraduates,
most of whom attended public high schools in the South. By their accounting,
not only are schools continuing to resist the Court’s most recent policies,
but substantial numbers of southern schools are evidently still
defying rulings that are decades old. The data reveal some of the links
between the level of compliance and regional social norms, external pressures
within a community, and the likely attitudes of school officials.
The Legal Context for Compliance
To assess the extent to which public schools comply with the Supreme
Court’s policies on school prayer, it will be helpful to survey the legal background
against which such compliance takes place. Schools engage in a
variety of activities that, in one way or another, touch upon religion, and a
good many of them have been adjudicated before the justices. For the purposes
of this analysis, I focus on those activities that involve the state’s promotion
of some type of devotional activity in its public schools. This
category, therefore, includes cases of required religious exercises but
excludes such issues as the expense of public funds for religious institutions
or religious purposes.2 Likewise, it omits instances of state-compelled
2 American Politics Research
speech that is not predominantly religious in orientation.3 What I generically
term school prayer cases are those in which the state imposes or facilitates
some measure of reverence from its students.
Within that general category, what sorts of policies have been forbidden
by the Supreme Court? The starting point is Engel v. Vitale (1962).
Some 15 years after the Court incorporated the Establishment Clause, the
justices entered the realm of school prayer in a case that examined the
constitutionality of a state-composed prayer that children were required to
recite. In striking down this practice, a nearly unanimous Court concluded
that ‘‘in this country it is no part of the business of government to compose
official prayers for any group of the American people to recite as a
part of a religious program carried on by government’’ (p. 425). Through
this ruling, the Court set the stage for a series of related questions that
were to arise in its wake.
The following year, the Court addressed the first of such questions:
whether public schools, instead of requiring recited prayer, could have
regular readings of the Lord’s Prayer and other selections from the Bible
in which students could voluntarily participate. In this case, Abington
School District v. Schempp (1963), the Court again concluded that by asking
students to recite a prayer or by leading students in selections from
scripture, the state was engaged in a religious ceremony that likewise constituted
a religious establishment.
After this decision, it would be nearly 20 years before the Court decided
another devotional case. In the interim, of course, the Court was preoccupied
with various other Establishment issues, not the least of which was the
formulation of the Lemon test, which would become the basis for evaluating
all subsequent questions in this area of the law.4 One of the prongs of that
test—whether the state is pursuing a valid secular purpose—was the basis
for the Court’s rejection of the posting of the Ten Commandments in school
classrooms. Rather than employ this sacred text for some legitimate educational
purpose, such as the study of religion or history, its use here was
designed ‘‘to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to
venerate and obey, the Commandments’’ (Stone v. Graham, 1980, p. 42).
Accordingly, just as the state may not direct students to pray, it may not put
into place a policy that it expects will produce the same result.
As a means of avoiding such a complication, various states responded by
adopting laws requiring moments of silence. Nevertheless, schools ran afoul
of the Establishment Clause when those policies were implemented as a
pretext for prayer. Thus, in Wallace v. Jaffree (1985) for example, Alabama
found its daily moment of silence—which was set aside for ‘‘meditation or
McGuire / Public Schools, Religious Establishments, and the U.S. Supreme Court 3
voluntary prayer’’—struck down because the state’s purpose was still to
encourage prayer at the beginning of the school day.
More recently, as states have seemingly abandoned making religious
practices a regular part of the curriculum, prayers have manifested themselves
in extracurricular settings. This has not inoculated these prayers from
legal challenge, however. In one such instance, Lee v. Weisman (1992), the
justices invalidated having members of the clergy provide benedictions at
high school graduations. In another instance, Santa Fe Independent School
District v. Doe (2000), the Court struck down a scheme in which students,
by ballot, authorized both invocations and the students who would deliver
them prior to varsity football games. In these cases, the justices concluded
that the state put into place policies that were designed to coerce students
into prayer.
Taken together, the teaching of these cases indicates that virtually any
state policy that promotes an expectation of religious devotion on the part
of students violates the Establishment Clause. The absence of ambiguity
would presumably make following the Court’s mandates a relatively simple
matter. Operating against this backdrop, public schools could readily
intuit that no matter what the form, school prayer was likely to be viewed
with skepticism by the justices.
That these policies have continued to appear before the Court in various
guises, though, also suggests that public schools have persevered in searching
for ways in which religious practices can be incorporated into their educational
programs. Indeed, there seems little doubt that the Court’s rulings
notwithstanding, a good many religious practices continue to percolate in
the public schools: Until quite recently, Louisiana permitted students to
pray aloud in their classrooms, with at least one school conducting prayers
over the school intercom (Firestone, 2001); in some places in Alabama,
devotional activities have simply continued unabated, with ‘‘sectarian
prayers . . . commonly recited over public address systems at the beginning
of the day, and at athletic events, assemblies and commencement ceremonies’’
(Sack, 1997, p. A9); and in one Mississippi school, ‘‘[t]he school regimen
had included daily prayers by students over the intercom, classroom
prayers before lunch, Bible classes taught by instructors chosen by local
churches and a voluntary prayer session for elementary students in the
school gym at the beginning of the day’’ (Applebome, 1996, p. A12).
Is this indicative of a more general pattern of indifference to the Court,
and if so what accounts for it? In the following sections, I sketch some
likely explanations for why these policies persist and then test some of
those intuitions.
4 American Politics Research
Theoretical Considerations
The implementation of public policy varies widely across different issues
and institutions, and political scientists have posited a variety of factors that
might explain this variation (see, for example, Goggin, Bowman, Lester, &
O’Toole, 1990; Nakamura & Smallwood, 1980). In terms of the implementation
of its policies, the Supreme Court is perhaps less favorably situated
than other institutions; after all, it has ‘‘neither the purse nor the sword’’ as
Hamilton famously observed. Still, the distinctiveness of the Court ought
not to be exaggerated. Indeed, many of the theoretical orientations that have
guided research on implementation in other institutions have been readily
applied to the study of judicial policy (Canon & Johnson, 1998).
Norms
One of the principal determinants of the implementation of judicial
policy is the existence of norms that structure and guide behavior. Policy
implementation requires change, and as a general matter institutional inertia
tends to thwart any modification of existing behaviors (Pressman &
Wildavsky, 1984). Indeed ‘‘with some organizations the pervasive nature of
an organizational ethos or set of norms overrides or reshapes individuals’
attitudes’’ (Canon & Johnson, 1998, p. 83). In a variety of contexts, institutional
norms channel and constrain the behavior of policy implementers. In
Congress, for example, budgetary norms affect the development of fiscal
policy (Wood, 2000). Likewise, the extent to which law enforcement personnel
shirk their day-to-day responsibilities are similarly affected by the
reinforcing effect of a distinctive ‘‘police culture’’ (Brehm & Gates, 1997).
In the case of prayer in schools, nowhere is the role of cultural norms
better exemplified than in the South, where religious traditions have long
commingled with various facets of public life. It is not surprising, therefore,
that research on reactions to the Court’s earlier decisions on school prayer
revealed that southern schools were the least likely to eliminate their religious
exercises in response to the Court. To be sure, school prayer may have
been practiced in other regions in somewhat greater numbers, but southern
schools were much less likely to abandon those practices after the Court
invalidated them (Birkby, 1966; Sorauf, 1976; Way, 1968). To the extent
that religion becomes an institutionalized part of public education within
the region, compliance with the Court’s decisions would naturally be subdued.
Accordingly, I anticipate that public schools in the South will be more
likely to maintain religious practices.
McGuire / Public Schools, Religious Establishments, and the U.S. Supreme Court 5
External Political Pressures
Leaving aside whether prayers may reflect long-standing practices, part
of the reason why schools would maintain such policies is that as public
institutions, they demonstrate a kind of democratic responsive to their constituents.
Various publics make demands of governmental institutions, and
pressures that run counter to policy mandates can thereby inhibit implementation
(Mazmanian & Sabatier, 1989). In the development of various kinds
of regulatory policy, for instance, affected interests have successfully sought
favorable treatment in such areas as consumer protection (Meier, 1987),
environmental protection (Wood & Waterman, 1991), and child support
(Keiser & Soss, 1998), to name but a few. Indeed, the catalog of pressures
brought to bear upon policy implementers is quite considerable (see, for
example, Hedge, Scicchitano, & Metz, 1991).
In one way or another, religious interests have long sought direction over
the course of public policy. Their increased organization, sophistication,
and financial resources have made them increasingly prominent within
American politics (see, for example, Green, Rozell, & Wilcox, 2000). Notable
among religious groups are Evangelical Christians, who have mobilized
in considerable numbers to lobby on all manner of public affairs (Wilcox,
2000).
The Christian Right has staked out conservative positions on numerous
social issues, including prayer in schools (Green & Guth, 1988; Wilcox,
2000). Those policy stances, backed by a strong norm of political activism,
are likely to convince the school districts in which they live to maintain
religious practices within their public schools, even if the justices of
the Supreme Court rule to the contrary. Larger concentrations of conservative
Christians should thus be linked to greater levels of noncompliance.
Quite apart from the number of conservative Christians, the sheer size
of the local population may have implications for compliance with the
Court. At least since Madison’s Federalist No.10, students of American
politics have recognized that smaller populations are more homogeneous
than larger ones and thus more apt to tyrannize political minorities. Drawing
from Hume’s observations about the oppressive tendencies of factions
(Spencer, 2002), Madison (1787/2003) explained that
[t]he smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and
interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more
frequently will a majority be found of the same party; and . . . the more
easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression. Extend the
6 American Politics Research
sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it
less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to
invade the rights of other citizens.
The size of the local community has particular relevance for noncompliance
with church–state doctrine. Not only do larger communities promote
greater ideological and religious pluralism (Way, 1968), living in close
proximity to other citizens accentuates their differences, thereby increasing
political awareness and ideological conflict (Aistrup, 2004). Moreover,
cities are more likely to facilitate oversight; they typically have institutionalized
means for channeling and responding to the complaints of parents
who oppose religion in the schools (Dolbeare & Hammond, 1971).
Thus, a larger, more densely populated environment should create competition
among religious and secular interests and likewise make it easier
for various religious (or irreligious) minorities to voice their concerns.
Such conditions should increase pressures for compliance. A smaller, more
widely dispersed polity, by contrast, should beget religious hegemony,
inasmuch as rural areas are more homogeneous and typically lack administrative
mechanisms for various minorities that oppose school prayer to gain
a political foothold. Accordingly, I expect the size of the local population to
affect noncompliance; smaller communities should encourage religious
activities in the schools, whereas larger ones should decrease such pressure.
Local pressures are apt to vary with other demographic factors, and one
of the most likely candidates is education. Higher levels of education within
a community often generate challenges to long-held traditions, including
prayer in schools (Way, 1968), and of course education generally correlates
with social liberalism (Golebiowska, 1995), which likely includes a disposition
against state-sponsored religious activities. One would expect, therefore,
that better educated communities would press their educational
institutions to limit the role of religious activities.
Of course, political conservatism might also figure in a community’s calculus
regarding school prayer. Conservatives generally endorse inculcating
traditional religious values in public education (Elifson & Hadaway, 1985),
so it is likely that schools will also make decisions in light of local ideology.
The higher the local concentration of conservatives, the greater the pressure
there will be to disregard the Court and to institute religious exercises of
one kind or another.
In addition to the characteristics of the local community, the demographic
composition of the school itself may have implications for compliance
with the Court’s decisions. Exposure to diversity, for example, has
McGuire / Public Schools, Religious Establishments, and the U.S. Supreme Court 7
traditionally been linked to tolerance of minority views and support for civil
liberties (Stouffer, 1955). Thus, a diverse study body should create an environment
that is supportive of the rights of outsiders and likewise less receptive
to religious indoctrination through the public school curriculum.
Attitudes of Implementers
The levels of enthusiasm for any public policy are likely to affect the
extent to which it is implemented. Key actors who are responsible for giving
force to laws, regulations, and rulings often respond to policies on the
basis of their attitudes (Edwards, 1980; Moe, 1982). Implementers who are
favorably disposed to a policy will seek to give it its fullest force, whereas
those who oppose it will engage in delay, obfuscation, or other footdragging
strategies. At the same time, policy implementers can speed the
development of rules when they personally identify with their agency’s
goals (Meier, 1987).
Positing this connection, researchers have shown, for example, that law
enforcement is lax when personnel dislike specific responsibilities (Brehm
& Gates, 1993). At the federal level, resistance from environmental officials
has slowed—or even reversed—the effects of major shifts in policy (Wood,
1988). Scholars of judicial policy have had little difficulty documenting
similar linkages. Glaring examples of Supreme Court mandates, such as rulings
on school desegregation, criminal procedure, and administrative law,
have been ignored or at least weakened because those responsible for putting
judicial policies into effect were opposed to those decisions (Rosenberg,
1991; Spriggs, 1997; White, 2003). For their part, judges who are, in
theory, bound by the doctrine of the U.S. Supreme Court systematically
seek to evade giving force to the Court’s policies with which they disagree
(Songer, Segal, & Cameron, 1994). In short, there seems little doubt that if
implementing populations disagree with their principal’s policies, they will
hinder the effectiveness of those policies.
On an issue as salient as religion in the public schools, there are doubtless
strong views within various schools and their personnel. Indeed, the
attitudes of implementers conditioned how schools responded to the Court’s
earliest rulings on this issue (Dolbeare & Hammond, 1971; Sorauf, 1976).
The notion of a Court that is physically distant and whose policies may be
imposed with little sensitivity to local concerns can be greeted with opposition
by those who wish to maintain their devotional activities. Accordingly,
I expect that the level of support for school prayer among public school officials
will be tied to the level of compliance with the Court’s decisions.
8 American Politics Research
Analysis
The best means by which to evaluate the level of religious activity in
public schools is not immediately obvious. One established method has
been to survey the implementers of policy, asking teachers, principals,
and other personnel in the public schools about the extent of their devotional
practices. Given that such surveys are inquiring about practices that
may be illegal, a potential drawback to this approach is resistance or a
possible lack of candor from the respondents.5
To overcome such problems for this analysis, I made use of an alternative
method: surveying a sample of college students, asking them to serve
as informants regarding the various forms of religious activities that took
place within their public schools. (Because I was particularly interested
in measuring some devotional activities that are apt to occur only at the
secondary level—blessings offered at graduation exercises or prayers at
sporting events, for example—I focused my attention on compliance
within high schools.) Conducted in February of 2004, the survey presented
each respondent with a list of devotional activities that have been prohibited
by the Supreme Court and asked which of them, if any, regularly took
place within the school when he or she was a student. By this method,
I was able to extract information about individual schools and their particular
practices without making inquiries from those who may be responsible
for establishing and maintaining such activities.6
To facilitate the data collection, I made use of a participant pool of
undergraduate students that is regularly made available through the Department
of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill.7 The usual cautions regarding the use of college students for research
obviously apply here, but in this context my substantive research question
produces some additional—and potentially frustrating—consequences. To
begin with, the sample is nonrandom. Because this method does not permit
me to survey individuals who are not attending college, the sample no doubt
overrepresents larger and more affluent communities whose students disproportionately
attend college. Similarly, the sample is restricted in terms of
geography; most of the public high schools on which the survey provided
data (79%) were located in North Carolina. This concentration notwithstanding,
there is actually a good deal of regional variation in the location
of the remaining schools in the sample.8
At the same time, these data do offer some distinct analytic advantages.
Among other things, they provide information on a relatively large number
McGuire / Public Schools, Religious Establishments, and the U.S. Supreme Court 9
of southern schools, a group that might otherwise be underrepresented in a
sample of this size. Moreover, in light of the historical prevalence of devotional
activities in public schools in the South, it is beneficial to have a
larger number of observations for the population that one would naturally
target when looking for signs of noncompliance.9
Some 252 students participated in this study. Of that number, 209
respondents were educated at 145 unique public schools. These data for
those individual schools serve as the basis for the analysis that follows.10
Measuring Noncompliance
As a preliminary matter, it is useful simply to examine the overall frequency
of faithful implementation of the Court’s various rulings on school
prayer. To survey the extent to which public high schools adhere to the
Court’s mandates, I present in Figure 1 the percentage of schools in which
the several prohibited activities still persist. Because the South has so frequently
figured in descriptive assessments of school prayer, I highlight its
relevance here as well, distinguishing between southern and nonsouthern
schools.11 These data reveal that there is a good deal of variation in noncompliance,
not only between regions but also between types of religious activity.
Figure 1
Noncompliance With Selected School Prayer Decisions
10 American Politics Research
Regular readings from the Bible were banned by the Court over 40 years
ago. So it is scarcely surprising that virtually no schools still adhere to the
practice.12 Similarly small numbers of schools post the Ten Commandments.
The ban on organized prayer—the Court’s longest standing policy
on devotional activities in public schools—is fully enforced, at least outside
the South. Almost one quarter of southern students, though, report that these
prayers remain a regular part of their education, despite the Court’s longestablished
policy to the contrary.
Besides prayer that is actively organized, time for private worship is
also afforded to students by a good many public schools in the South. Of
course, following the decision in Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), a number of
states set about permitting moments of silence that were devoid of any
religious connotation, policies that have subsequently been upheld in
lower courts (Masters, 2001). For that reason, respondents were asked to
distinguish both moments of silence and time for private prayer in their
schools. (Even if respondents conflated the two items—and it is not clear
that they did—the stark differences between the South, where almost 20%
have generic moments of silence, and elsewhere, where no such practices
were reported, would suggest that the current moment of silence laws are
not motivated by secular concerns.)
The two most recent rulings are the most widely disobeyed.13 More than
half of the southern schools in the sample still observe the practice of offering
invocations for their graduates at commencement. A majority of the
southern schools also offer prayers of some type at their sporting events.
Even schools outside the South are more prone to these forms of resistance
to the Court. Roughly 10% offer prayers during athletics and over 20% follow
the tradition of offering a blessing for their graduating classes.
Overall, southern schools clearly outpace their peers in their resistance
to the Supreme Court. To the extent that these data might reflect more
general trends, they indicate that in at least some noteworthy respects
many if not most public high schools in the South may be ignoring some
of the justices’ rulings in the area of prayer in schools. At the same time, a
good degree of noncompliance with the justices’ decisions is also present
elsewhere. What accounts for this behavior?
Explanatory Models
To develop a systematic examination of compliance with the Court,
I construct a series of predictive models in which to play out the various
theoretical notions concerning the norms, pressures, and attitudes that
McGuire / Public Schools, Religious Establishments, and the U.S. Supreme Court 11
comprise the context in which local schools respond to the justices’ policies.
In these models, I examine the intensity of noncompliance by a simple
sum of the total number of rulings that are not followed within a
school. This variable can range from 0 (compliance with all of the Court’s
school prayer rulings) to 6 (compliance with none of the six rulings).
Although by this count the modal category is 0, fully 66% of the schools
provided evidence of one or more failures to follow the Court’s lead, and
40% reported at least two prohibited devotional activities. Given the
Table 1
Explanatory Models of Noncompliance With School Prayer Decisions
Norms
Model
Pressures
Model
Attitudes
Model
Full
Model
Variable (1) (2) (3) (4)
Geographic latitude of school −0.12 ∗∗∗ — — −0.094∗∗
(0.03) (0.033)
Evangelicals — 2.00∗∗ — 1.46∗
(0.78) (0.80)
Population density — −0.15∗∗ — −0.17 ∗∗
(0.05) (0.06)
Evangelicals×population density — 0.21 ∗∗ — 0.21 ∗∗
(0.09) (0.11)
Level of education — −0.018∗∗ — −0.018∗∗
(0.007) (0.006)
Political conservatism of community — 0.012 — 0.008
(0.008) (0.008)
Diversity of school — −0.09 — −0.38
(0.46) (0.50)
Number of teachers — — −0.63∗ 0.13
(0.26) (0.26)
Ratio of students to teachers — — 0.005 0.020
(0.016) (0.018)
Constant 4.58 −1.13 0.77 2.35
(1.19) (0.62) (0.37) (1.39)
Wald chi2 12.70∗∗∗ 45.46∗∗∗ 6.53∗ 43.77∗∗∗
Pseudo R2 .03 .13 .02 .14
Note: N=145; results are for event-count models with robust standard errors where the
dependent variable is the number of school policies that violate the Supreme Court’s rulings
on school prayer; numbers in parentheses are standard errors.
∗p<.05. ∗∗p<.01. ∗∗∗p<.001, one-tailed test.
12 American Politics Research
nature of this dependent variable, an event count model is appropriate,
and I employ that analytic technique throughout the analysis.14 The results
are reported in Table 1.15
To assess the impact of local norms on noncompliance, I begin by confirming
what the data in Figure 1 clearly seem to indicate, that the degree
of resistance to the Court is regionally dependent. The results, labeled as
the Norms Model in the first column of Table 1, illustrate this linkage. To
enhance the analysis, I model noncompliance as a function of geographic
latitude, rather than through a South versus non-South dummy variable.
Measuring just how far south a school is located has intuitive appeal; after
all, a school in South Carolina probably differs substantially from a school
in Northern Virginia in terms of its dispositions toward school prayer.
Because latitude decreases in a southerly direction, the negative coefficient
confirms that the further south a school is located, the more recalcitrant
it will be when it comes to adhering to the Court’s mandates on
school prayer.16 By these results, there is strong evidence for the existence
of a regional norm.
As an alternative, I test for the impact of community pressures. Although
the respondents were not in a position to provide reliable demographic data
that might reflect the characteristics of their communities, they did report
both the names and locations of their schools, and this information facilitates
gathering useful indicators contained in the records of the U.S. Census
and related data sources.
One such indicator is the concentration of the Christian Right. Indeed, at
the national level, the issue of school prayer has been one on which Evangelicals
have lobbied quite extensively in Congress (Hertzke, 1988). Although
the U.S. Census does not collect data on religious affiliation, at least one
data source provides a relatively recent and comprehensive survey of religious
affiliation, if only by county, and census data can be readily employed
to match individual communities with their respective counties within a
state.17 Calculating Evangelicals as a percentage of a county’s total number
of adherents to any Judeo-Christian faith, I have a rough gauge of the level
of community pressure that a school is likely to face from its conservative
Christians to maintain devotional exercises in the public schools.
Taken by itself, religious conservatism may affect noncompliance, but
its impact may well be conditioned by the context in which it exists. The
effect of a high concentration of Evangelicals should be magnified in more
remote, sparsely populated areas, where like-minded communities can
readily apply religious pressures without fear of running afoul of competing
secular interests. Conversely, where large numbers of Evangelicals are
McGuire / Public Schools, Religious Establishments, and the U.S. Supreme Court 13
concentrated alongside the manifold interests of their nearby neighbors—
in places such as Charlotte, North Carolina, and Richmond, Virginia, for
example—their effects may be muted, inasmuch as it is an environment in
which opposing factions, even if they are in the minority, can more readily
organize, apply greater scrutiny, and counter religious goals.
On its own, of course, higher population density should tend to tamp
down noncompliance, as proximity more readily draws competing interests
into conflict. But to test whether density (or, rather, the lack of it)
exacerbates the impact of religious conservatism, I include an interaction
between population density and the concentration of Evangelicals. I measure
population density as the number of residents per square mile,18 but
to more easily interpret the interaction, I center this variable, so that it is
measured in positive and negative deviations from its mean.
Educational attainment is captured by the Census’s percentage of local
residents with a bachelor’s degree. The expectation here is straightforward;
better educated communities will be more supportive of civil liberties
and therefore counteract the dispositions that schools might have to
introduce or maintain religious exercises.
To measure political conservatism, I employ the percentage of the twoparty
vote in each county that was cast in favor of George Bush in the presidential
election of 2000.19 Inasmuch as the candidates in a presidential
election are constant across the states, this variable serves as a plausible
indicator of where a community places itself along the ideological divide.
Finally, to assess the pressures against prayer that are likely to emanate
from a diverse community, I calculate each school’s degree of racial and
ethnic diversity. This index—which, as a technical matter, is simply the
probability that two randomly chosen people will differ along one or more
measured characteristics—is widely used to assess the diversity of educational
institutions (Meyer & McIntosh, 1992).20
The estimated effects of these various measures of community context
are presented in the second column of Table 1, labeled as the Pressures
Model. Most of the estimates are significant and together do a better job
of accounting for noncompliance than the previous equation, which modeled
noncompliance as a function of the regional norms of the South.
Taken together, these estimates confirm that community pressures exercise
an important influence on the intensity of religious activities in the
local schools.
The estimates for both Evangelicals and population density are statistically
significant and in the expected direction. Interpreting interactive
14 American Politics Research
effects, however, is perennially problematic; once an interaction is introduced
into an equation, it is no longer possible to discuss the independent
impact of the variables, because their interaction makes each of their effects
conditional on the values of the other. Centering one of the variables about
its mean helps to reduce potential confusion. By holding the variable—in
this case, population density—constant at its centered mean (i.e., zero), both
the centered variable and interaction drop out of the equation and thereby
allow the analyst to assess the impact of the other variable.
Thus, the significant coefficient for Evangelicals can be interpreted
straightforwardly as the impact of religious conservatism, holding population
density at its mean. By this accounting, as the concentration of Evangelicals
increases, so too does noncompliance with the Court’s school
prayer rulings. How much substantive impact do Evangelicals exert? In
event-count models, the coefficients do not have an intuitive meaning.21
One way to illustrate their impact, however, is to generate predictions of
the amount of noncompliance for schools facing different levels of conservative
Christians, while holding all other variables at their means. The
results of this exercise show that in a county where Evangelicals constitute
only 20% of the faithful, one would expect to see strong compliance, with
schools ignoring less than one (0.52) Supreme Court ruling. Where Evangelicals
comprise half of all church-goers, however, the local schools are
likely to be circumventing about one (0.95) school prayer decision; nearly
two (1.72), where the level of Evangelicals reaches 80%.
Adding population density to the mix reveals a more complex relationship.
Here again the estimated effects are instructive. Presented in Figure 2,
they confirm that increases in the number of conservative Christians lead to
a larger number of religious practices in the public schools, regardless of
whether those schools are located among scattered or concentrated populations.
More significantly, these estimates verify that as expected, Evangelicals
bring about substantially more pressure in smaller, more sparsely
populated communities.
Where residents are diffused throughout the community, Evangelicals
need constitute as little as 20% of the religious population to generate
slightly less than one (.89) prohibited religious exercise in the local
schools. By contrast, when residents live side-by-side in more populous
areas, that same level of religious conservatism can produce only .30 of a
religious activity. Even at 40%, Evangelicals still produce twice as much
school prayer in rural areas as they do in urban centers (1.08 and 0.55,
respectively). To be sure, the religious Right can have a sizable impact in
densely populated areas, but they require substantially greater numbers to
McGuire / Public Schools, Religious Establishments, and the U.S. Supreme Court 15
offset the effects of varied and competing interests living in close proximity
to one another. Stated differently, population tamps down the impact of
conservative Christians, especially where there are relatively few of them.
In addition to the combined effect of Evangelicals and population density,
education emerges as a significant predictor in the local political preferences
model. Inasmuch as they tend to be less supportive of minority
rights, communities that are less educated create an environment that is
receptive to religious activities within these schools. Likewise, the level of
political conservatism among local residents is substantively relevant,
though just below the standard level of statistical significance: The farther
to the right a community is, the greater its support for school prayer, which
in turn translates into greater noncompliance.
In this model of school prayer, only the diversity of the school fails
to make a meaningful explanatory contribution. By these lights, constitutionally
questionable religious practices are not deterred by students and
parents of disparate backgrounds.22 Of course, the impact of this variable
is likely offset by other measures in the model, such as education level
and population density, which are often correlates of a diverse population
(see, for example, Gray & Lowery, 1993; Sullivan, 1973).
Figure 2
Impact of Evangelicals and Population Density on Noncompliance
Note: Low and high density are defined, respectively, as 500 persons/square mile below or
above the mean population density of 969 persons/square mile.
16 American Politics Research
What role do the preferences of the implementing population play?
Unfortunately, because the survey data are derived from students rather than
teachers or administrators, there are no direct measures of the attitudes of
school personnel. Still, the available data do afford a basis for generating at
least some proxies of their probable dispositions. For example, the U.S.
Department of Education’s Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe
Data provide information on the number of teachers in a school. Extending
the Madisonian rationale, one might reckon that smaller numbers of teachers
are likely to be homogeneous in their attitudes and interests. Of
course, that does not necessarily mean that a smaller faculty is keener to
have religious activities than the teachers who are part of a larger group of
instructors, but a smaller faculty does create the circumstances that are
favorable for such practices to take root and blossom.
Also contained in the federal government’s school survey data are
student-to-faculty ratios. Class size has been extensively studied, and quite
a lot is known about what it is likely to reflect (Glass, Cahen, Smith, &
Filby, 1982). Among other things, teachers undergo a system of self-sorting,
whereby more capable and qualified teachers seek better career opportunities,
which results in their placement into better schools with reduced
class sizes (Lankford, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2002). At a minimum, therefore,
schools with higher student-to-faculty ratios are likely to have teachers who
are less aware of the Court and less able to appreciate the subtleties of legal
doctrine, all else being equal. Again, one cannot assume a priori that such
teachers are more sympathetic to the goals of religious accommodation in
the classroom, but they are certainly less likely to comprehend the Court’s
various prohibitions. Thus, to whatever degree teachers are inclined to promote
religious practices, they are more likely to act on those inclinations in
an environment where the legal implications of those practices are unclear.
The estimates for these variables are reported in the Attitudes Model of
Table 1. As expected, decreases in the size of a school’s faculty increase
the level of noncompliance with the Court. A smaller faculty—and thus
one likely to have shared attitudes—makes noncompliance more likely.
At the same time, however, schools with larger classes—and with, by
implication, less capable instructors—are no more prone to prayer than
are the schools with faculty who better appreciate the Court’s mandates.
To the extent that these measures tap into the orientations and preferences
of teachers, they provide at least some confirmation that the dispositions
of those who actually implement the Court’s school prayer rulings have a
hand in determining how vigorously implementation will be pursued.
McGuire / Public Schools, Religious Establishments, and the U.S. Supreme Court 17
Telling as these individual models are, they do not reveal the relative
effects of norms, community pressures, and the attitudes of implementers.
How do these various explanations fare when tested against one another?
To answer this question, I estimated the Full Model, which includes each of
these various predictors, and I present their effects in Table 1’s Equation 4.
When these alternative sets of explanations are permitted to compete,
two of the three maintain their statistical influence. The traditions of the
South continue to explain noncompliance with the Court, and the various
social forces that exist within local communities also help to account for
the presence of prayer in the public schools. By contrast, the preferences
of school personnel—or, at least, the proxies drawn from available data—
have no empirical bearing on a school’s questionable religious practices.
It is scarcely a wonder that the regional norms of the South continue to
exercise a significant impact; after all, southern states have long resisted
the justices’ mandates on church–state relations (Way, 1968), and legal
challenges to school prayer have often emanated from places such as Alabama
(Wallace v. Jaffree, 1985), Kentucky (Stone v. Graham, 1980), and
Texas (Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, 2000). Although the
estimate remains significant in the multivariate model, the magnitude of
the South’s effect is attenuated by other variables in the equation. Still, the
farther into the South one travels, the more likely one is to find religious
practices in the public schools.
The measures of community pressure also maintain their predictive
force. The combined effects of Evangelicals and population density
remain significant, and the education level of the local population continues
to explain why some public schools do not comply with the Court’s
mandates. As in the preceding model, however, racial and ethnic diversity
within a school still has no bearing on the persistence of banned religious
practices, and the level of political conservatism, which was previously at
the margin of statistical significance, is now rendered irrelevant.
Taken by themselves, the attitudes of school personnel may determine
whether the Court’s rulings will be carried out, but viewed in conjunction
with regional norms and community pressures, they, in fact, reveal no connection
to school prayer. That does not mean, of course, that teachers individually
do not conduct religious exercises in their classrooms; teachers
who support prayer in schools may be initiating their own devotional activities,
even if a school has not institutionalized such practices. Leaving aside
such individual variation, the indicators of faculty preferences, though useful,
are not as direct as one might prefer. A survey of school personnel, as
opposed to students, could well reveal a much different picture.
18 American Politics Research
In sum, I hypothesized that the strong religious traditions of the South
would contribute to noncompliance and that various community pressures—
those wrought by Evangelicals to inject prayer in school and those created
by large, diverse, and educated communities to resist it—would likewise
affect the relationship between religion and public education. In addition, the
attitudes of school personnel, which might variously increase or decrease
compliance, were also tested, albeit less directly.
The analysis revealed that southern schools continue to show a markedly
higher degree of defiance of the Court. In this region of the country,
where translating judicial will into public action has always proven to be
problematic, there remains a significantly greater degree of resistance to
these generally unpopular pronouncements of the Court. So, regardless of
other contextual factors, these schools evince their historical obstinacy
when it comes to following the Supreme Court. At the same time, various
community forces work to either encourage or discourage religious practices.
Higher concentrations of the Christian Right—especially in sparsely
populated areas where residents are more likely to share a common cultural
outlook, less likely to consider the rights of political minorities, and
less likely to foment opposition to prayer—minimize any reluctance to
keep devotional activities in their local schools. The concerns over minority
rights, however, are heightened in well-educated areas, thereby reducing
the incidence of noncompliance.
Conclusions
Some 40 years after the Supreme Court first considered the question of
religious activities in the schools, devotional exercises, in one form or
another, seem to continue. Although the justices have invalidated numerous
programs of public prayer, their decisions seem scarcely to have been
fully implemented. School prayers, whether organized and led by educators
or encouraged by setting aside time for private worship, appear in a
substantial number of schools.
Of course, no decision of the Court can expect full and faithful implementation.
There are numerous examples of decisions that are rejected,
either by political elites or the public at large. Although it is difficult to
know how compliance in the case of school prayer compares to other
areas of the Court’s policymaking, it would surely be unrealistic to expect
all religious activities to have ceased within the schools.
McGuire / Public Schools, Religious Establishments, and the U.S. Supreme Court 19
At the same time, when viewed against earlier findings on the impact
of the Court’s first decisions on religion in the schools, the levels of noncompliance
documented here are quite stark. Even 10 years after the Court
struck down prayer at high school commencements, for example, a good
many public schools in this sample still adhere to the practice, and 40
years after the fact, organized prayer is still reported to a sizable degree.
Moreover, these data are from public schools whose graduates go on to
college. There seems little doubt that the public schools that do not regularly
produce collegiate timber are systematically different from those that
do. If these schools are smaller, more rural, and concentrated in the South,
then the rate of devotional activities documented here is surely an underestimate.
So, not only is there a considerable number of schools that are
ignoring the Court, there are probably a good many more. Seen in this
way, the resistance to the Court’s policies seems substantial indeed.
Certainly, these data suggest that a more extended exploration of this
subject will generate substantial insights. This initial look at the implementation
of school prayer decisions is the first of several planned components
of a larger study, the next stage of which is a national survey of high school
principals, which will gather more particular information about individual
public schools and the attitudes of its administrators. By this means, I hope
to develop a more detailed portrait of how schools react to the Court.
What the findings presented here surely indicate is that there remains a
gap between the pronouncements of the Supreme Court and the practices
of individual schools. Understanding how wide that gap is and why
requires further investigation. But, the steady level of popular support for
religion in the schools—and the search by various local schools for innovative
ways to encourage or permit religious practices—will continue to
generate conflicts in the Court and thereby assure that this subject will
remain fertile ground for scholarly exploration.
Notes
1. See, for example, the General Social Survey, reported in Table 8–23, Epstein, Segal,
Spaeth, and Walker (1996).
2. See, for example, Everson v. Board of Education (1947), Rosenberger v. University of
Virginia (1995), Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002).
3. See, for example, West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943).
4. See Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971). Although it has since been much criticized by various
justices, it remains the foundation for the Court’s Establishment Clause jurisprudence.
20 American Politics Research
5. Of course, one ought not to overstate this potential problem, given that school personnel
may be unaware of the Court’s rulings or may not perceive any problems with their religious
practices, even if they are knowledgeable about such decisions. As Dolbeare and
Hammond (1971) explained regarding the success of their interviews of school personnel,
‘‘The candor of almost all interviewees not only convinced us of the authenticity of their
remarks but also provided us with a major theme of this report: no one had anything to hide
because hardly anyone judged that his community was doing anything illegal’’ (p.157).
6. The text of the survey, along with a replication data set, is available at http://www
.unc.edu/~kmcguire/data.html.
7. Each semester, the students in a large section of an introductory course in American
politics are required to participate as research subjects in one of several different research
projects that are undertaken by faculty and graduate students within the political science
department. Students may elect to write a paper in lieu of participating in the subject pool,
but this is a temptation that virtually all students seem to be able to resist.
8. Specifically, the data contain public high schools from the following states: Pennsylvania
(5%), Maryland (3%), New York (3%), South Carolina (2%), Florida (1%), Illinois
(1%), Massachusetts (1%), New Jersey (1%), Texas (1%), Vermont (1%), Virginia (1%), and
Washington (1%).
9. Although North Carolina schools dominate the data set, the results that are reported
below can generally be obtained by either excluding that state’s schools from the analysis or
including a variable that measures any of its potential idiosyncrasies.
10. In several cases, there were multiple students who reported attending the same school.
(There were, for example, a handful of students who attended the same high school in Charlotte,
which is not surprising given that Charlotte is North Carolina’s largest city.) Because
my unit of analysis is the individual school, not the individual student, it was necessary to
aggregate those students into a single observation. In a small number of those cases, there
were minor discrepancies in the forms of devotional activity that they reported. In those
cases, if any student reported any form of noncompliant behavior, I coded it as having taken
place within that school. There is no reason to think that these discrepancies are causing a
systematic bias one way or the other, and even if they did create a bias, these cases could be
excluded from the data without affecting the results.
11. Although scholars sometimes define the South in slightly different ways, I employ the
standard classification, which identifies the South as the secessionist states of Alabama,
Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee,
Texas, and Virginia. This designation has long been employed in survey research, most
notably in the American National Election Study (ANES).
12. In fact, only two respondents—one whose high school was in the South and another
whose high school was in the North—reported this activity. Ironically, another of the respondents
in the sample attended Abington Senior High School, the same Pennsylvania school
whose Bible readings gave rise to the Schempp case. This student reported that Bible readings
did not take place at the school—nor did any other religious activity, for that matter.
13. Note that the 5-year time lag between the Court’s most recent ruling in 2000 and the
survey in 2004 is sufficient to ensure that respondents would have been attending potentially
noncompliant schools. That is, they would have been in high school after the Court’s decision.
14. There are, of course, other ways to model noncompliance. One might, for example,
measure noncompliance through a series of models that predict deviation from each of the
McGuire / Public Schools, Religious Establishments, and the U.S. Supreme Court 21
individual rulings, but the insufficient variance in several of these variables renders this
approach impractical. One might also simply predict the presence or absence of noncompliance
with any of the Court’s rulings. For the purpose of this analysis, however, I am interested
in estimating the intensity of noncompliance, not its mere presence. However these
alternative models are specified, their results are highly consistent with the inferences produced
by this analysis.
15. Owing to the possibility of overdispersion in the data, each of the models in Table 1
were reestimated using negative binomial regression, and the results were virtually identical.
A copy of these results is available from the author.
16. Of course, latitude alone does not denote Southernness, inasmuch as some states (Arizona
and New Mexico, for example) are southern only in a geographic sense, not in a political
sense. This, it turns out, is not a concern in these data, because only one school in the
data—a high school in Washington state—is located west of Texas.
17. These data are located in the American Religion Data Archive (ARDA) at Pennsylvania
State University. The specific data file I employ is ‘‘Churches and Church Membership in
the United States, 1990,’’ a study funded by the Lily Endowment and conducted by the
Church Growth Research Center, Church of the Nazarene, Kansas City, Missouri. The data
archive maintains extensive background information on various religious families, and I rely
upon their designation when coding which denominations qualify as Evangelicals.
18. County population estimates are taken from U.S. Census data. As the measure of
Evangelicals was derived from a sample of 1990 data, I employ figures from the 1990 Census.
In all of the analyses, however, one could easily substitute data from the 2000 Census
and derive nearly identical coefficients.
19. These data were obtained from the CQ Voting and Elections Collection, an electronic
resource that is a part of the CQ Electronic Library.
20. This variable is calculated as 1 minus the sum of the squared percentages of students
from each of the following categories: Native American, Asian, Hispanic, White, and African
American. These data are reported in the Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey
Data at the U.S. Department of Education’s Web site.
21. Technically, the estimated effect is the exponential function of the product of the
coefficient and the value of that independent variable.
22. The diversity index can also be calculated for the religious orientations within the
county. On its own, this index is a statistically significant predictor of noncompliance.
Greater religious pluralism, as one would expect, reduces noncompliance with the Court.
Allowing this variable to compete with the concentration of Evangelicals in a multivariate
model, however, eliminates its effects.
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24 American Politics Research
Kevin T. McGuire is professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. He is the author of Understanding the U.S. Supreme Court and The Supreme
Court Bar. His research on the U.S. Supreme Court has appeared in a variety of journals,
including the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science,
and the Journal of Politics.

Writings and Papers of United States Supreme Court Justices
Table of Contents
Research Guides and Bibliographies ……………………………………………………………………………… 1
Collected Works – Multiple Justices……………………………………………………………………………….. 2
Papers…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 2
Biographical Sources …………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 2
Databases ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 3
Periodicals…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 5
Catalog Subject Headings ……………………………………………………………………………………………… 5
Research Guides and Bibliographies
Abraham, Henry J., “Biographies, Autobiographies, and Related Works of and by Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States,” in The Judicial Process : An Introductory Analysis of the Courts of the United States, England, and France, 5th ed., 1986, at page 469. Law Library K 2100 .A27 1985.
Bader, William D. and Mersky, Roy M., “Selected Bibliography – Biography and Autobiography: The Justices and Their Ideas,” in The First One Hundred Eight Justices, 2004, at page 131. Law Library KF 8741 .A152 2004
Duffy, Jill, and Lambert, Elizabeth, “Researching the Supreme Court of the United States,” http://www.supremecourthistory.org/06_research/06.html
“Entertaining Supreme Court Literature.” (Dorraine Zief Law Library, University of San Francisco) http://www.usfca.edu/law_library/supread.html
Partin, Gail, “The Supreme Court: Research Guide and Bibliography, ” 2003. See links to current justices and selected former justices. http://www.dsl.psu.edu/library/lrr/guides/supct/index.html
Ray, Laura Krugman, “Lives of the Justices: Supreme Court Autobiographies,” 37 Connecticut Law Review 233 (2004-2005).
2
6/09
Collected Works – Multiple Justices
Borgen, Christopher J., ed., “A Decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind…”: Selected Speeches by Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court on Foreign and International Law, 2007. Law Library KF 4581 .D43 2007
Westin, Alan, ed., An Autobiography of the Supreme Court: Off-the-Bench Commentary by the Justices, 1978, c1963. Law Library KF 8742 .A5W48 1963r (reprint)
Westin, Alan, ed., The Supreme Court: Views from Inside, 1961. Law Library KF 8742 .A5W4
Papers
Library of Congress Manuscript Division http://www.loc.gov/rr/mss/mss_abt.html
The Manuscript Division houses the nation’s largest collection of papers of chief justices and associate justices. Judicial papers contain materials that range from diaries and family correspondence to scrapbooks of newspaper clippings and memoranda. Selected documents are available digitally through the American Memory Project, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/mcchtml/polihm.html . Finding aids for all collections are at http://www.loc.gov/rr/mss/f-aids/mssfa.html#s .
Holman, Mark, Online Finding Aids to the Papers of Supreme Court Justices. http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/vlibrary/spct/justices.html
Wigdor, Alexandra K., The Personal Papers of the Supreme Court Justices: A Descriptive Guide. Bibliography: p. 21-27. Law Office KF 8744 .W55 1986
Wonders, Peter, Directory of Manuscript Collections Related to Federal Judges, 1789 – 1997. Law Library Microfiche JU 13.14:M31; also at Federal Judicial Center web site: http://www.fjc.gov/ under Publications and Videos.
The Louis Dembitz Brandeis Papers. Law Library Microfilm 505; copies of guide with microfilm and Law Library KF 8745.B67 A42 1985
The Salmon P. Chase Papers. Law Library E 415.6 .C48 1993
The Felix Frankfurter Papers. Law Library Microfilm 503; copies of guide with microfilm and Law Library KF8745.F7 A4 1986
The Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Papers. Law Library Microfilm 504; copies of guide with microfilm and Law Library KF8745.H6 A42 1985
Papers of Supreme Court Justices. Earl Warren. Law Library Microfilm 538
Papers of Supreme Court Justices. Wiley Rutledge. Law Library Microfilm 565
Biographical Sources
3
Almanac of the Federal Judiciary, vol. 2. Law Reference KF8700 .A19A44, current. Superseded volumes are in the Law Library general collection.
The American Bench. 1977- . Biographical sketches of individual justices sometimes cite their writings. Law Library KF 8700.A19 A47, latest on Reference.
Friedman, Leon, compiler, The Justices of the United States Supreme Court, 1789 – 1969, Their Lives and Major Opinions. 5 vols. Law Library KF 8744 .F75
Hall, Timothy L., Supreme Court Justices: A Biographical Dictionary, 2001. Law Library KF 8744 .H35 2001. Contains a bibliography of materials by and about the justices.
Urofsky, Melvin, ed., The Supreme Court Justices: A Biographical Dictionary, 1994. Law Reference KF 8744 .S859 1994
Urofsky, Melvin, Biographical Encyclopedia of the Supreme Court: The Lives and Legal Philosophies of the Justices, 2006. Law Library KF 8744 .B56 2006
Databases
America: History and Life
Focuses on the history and culture of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Indexes and abstracts journal articles, and indexes book reviews, dissertations, and other materials published since 1954.
ArchivesUSA
Indexes the holdings of archival repositories and primary source collections in the United States.
Bibliography of Early American Law (BEAL)
A finding aid for locating resources that discuss American law and American legal development since the beginning of American history through 1860. The Law Library also has the seven volume print version of this title at KF 1 .C58 1998.
C19, The Nineteenth Century Index
Indexes books, articles, and archival materials by integrating several indexes including the Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, The Wellesley Index, Poole’s Index, and Periodicals Index Online.
4
6/09
HeinOnline
The Supreme Court Library contains biographies of chief justices and some associate justices; selected writings of Justice Joseph Story. The Law Journal Library has the text of articles about and by the justices. The Legal Classics Library, a full-text collection, may be searched or browsed by author, including, for example, justices Joseph Story, Louis Brandeis, and Benjamin N. Cardozo.
Index to Legal Periodicals
Indexes legal journals from 1908- . Links to full text of many of the articles.
ISI Web of Knowledge
Indexes journal articles in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities.
JSTOR
Provides full text access to selected scholarly journals in history, economics, political science, philosophy, mathematics, and other fields of the humanities and social sciences; does not include issues for the most recent 3 to 5 years.
Legal Trac
Indexes law reviews, legal newspapers, bar association journals, and international legal journals. It also covers law-related articles from business and general interest titles.
LexisNexis – Search the Journals and Periodicals files. (Available to law students, faculty, and staff only)
LexisNexis Congressional
Indexing and some full text of confirmation hearings, which list works of Supreme Court nominees.
Making of Modern Law Digital Archive: Legal Treatises 1800 – 1926
A collection of digitized casebooks, local practice manuals, books on legal form, works for lay readers, pamphlets, letters, and speeches from Great Britain, Ireland, and the United States. Contains works of notable treatise-writing justices such as Joseph Story.
19th Century Masterfile
Indexes books, articles, U.S. patents, and governmental publications prior to 1925. It includes the Index to Legal Periodical Literature 1786 – 1922.
PAIS
Indexes journal articles, books, government documents, research reports, and other literature relevant to political science and public affairs.
Westlaw – Search the Journals and Law Reviews file (JLR). (Available to law students, faculty, and staff only)
5
WorldCat
Combined catalog of many U.S. and foreign libraries. Search by author to identify books, monographs, collected works, and documents written by justices.
Periodicals
Supreme Court Historical Society. Yearbook. 1976 – 1989. Law Library KF8741.A15 S87
Journal of Supreme Court History : Yearbook of the Supreme Court Historical Society. 1990 -1995 Law Library KF 8741.A15 S87
Journal of Supreme Court History. 1996 – . Law Library KF8741.A15 S87; http://proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/login?url=http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/loi/jsch
Catalog Subject Headings
United States. Supreme Court — Officials and employees — Biography
United States. Supreme Court — Biography
United States. Supreme Court — Bibliography
Judges — United States — Biography
Judges — United States — Correspondence, reminiscences, etc
Use the justice’s name as a subject heading, e.g.: “Taney, Roger Brooke” to find works about him/her that may list or discuss writings.

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U.S. Supreme Court

Download PDF version of guide for print

I. Introduction

The United States Supreme Court is the most watched and researched court in the country, if not the world. Its opinions are available in many formats, and many primary and secondary sources are available for research into the Court’s decisions and the Court itself. In fact, the Court is so important that under Bluebook Rule 8, it is the only court where a capital “C” must be used any time the Court is mentioned.
Supreme Court resources are often organized by term. The Court originally convened in two terms each year, with several modifications of start dates along the way. Since an 1873 statute (28 U.S.C. § 2), a single annual term convenes on the first Monday of October and runs through the summer. Each October Term (OT) is designated by the year it begins; for example, the term that commenced in October 1989 and ran through summer of 1990 is often referred to as OT 1989.
This guide describes sources and coverage of opinions, orders, briefs, oral arguments, rules, docket information, and secondary sources. The Supreme Court website is discussed first, with alternatives, paper resources, and highlights from other sites in the sections that follow.

II. Supreme Court Website

The Supreme Court’s official website debuted in 2000 and continually adds materials. Opinions and Journals are available in slip form on the Court’s website in PDF format and remain until the print volume of the U.S. Reports is published. Opinions from bound volumes 502 (OT 1991) to date are available. Guides to opinions and how to obtain them are also included.
The status of requests for certiorari or rehearing, motions in pending cases, and the status of other applications summarily decided are encompassed in Orders, available on the site from OT 2003. The Court’s Journal is available from OT 1993, compiling orders, bar admissions, other case information, and Court announcements.
The Court makes unofficial versions of briefs for the current term available in PDF through the ABA’s Preview of United States Supreme Court Cases. Briefs are listed in alphabetical order and can also be sorted by argument date. The Court website also provides a guide, “Where to Find Briefs,” to both electronic and paper formats.
The Court’s docket for the current and previous terms is searchable by Supreme Court docket number, lower court docket number, and case name. Links to Questions Presented are available for all granted and noted cases.
A permanent, PDF archive of oral arguments starts with OT 2000 and new transcripts are added on the same day that the arguments are heard. A thorough guide to obtaining oral argument transcripts is available, along with calendars and schedules for the current OT.
Additional materials include unannotated Court rules effective February 16, 2010, available in a PDF file, forms and instructions on Supreme Court bar admissions, select speeches from current Justices, and secondary sources on the Justices, the history of the Court, and on handling cases.

III. Opinions

According to the Supreme Court’s website: “The Court’s caseload has increased steadily to a current total of more than 10,000 cases on the docket per Term. The increase has been rapid in recent years. In 1960, only 2,313 cases were on the docket, and in 1945, only 1,460. Plenary review, with oral arguments by attorneys, is granted in about 100 cases per Term. Formal written opinions are delivered in 80-90 cases. Approximately 50-60 additional cases are disposed of without granting plenary review.”

A. Print

Supreme Court opinions are first available in paper in U.S. Law Week (Reference Indexes; also available through Lexis, Westlaw and BNA Electronic Library) about one week after the decisions are announced. These “slip” opinions are named for the individual pamphlet format of this generation of the opinion. Approximately one month later, the opinions are published in the advance sheets of the two unofficial Supreme Court reporters, West’s Supreme Court Reporter and United States Supreme Court Reports, Lawyers’ Edition. The former covers back to 1882 (106 U.S.) and references ALR sets, C.J.S., and case annotations; the latter provides research references to the ALR sets, Am Jur 2d, and case annotations.
Official U.S. Reports preliminary prints are published two to three months after the decision. Another year or two later, the permanent bound editions of all three reporters are published. All of the bound reports for the U.S. Supreme Court are located on Level 3.
Finding aids for print volumes are located on Level 3 with the reporters. United States Supreme Court Digest, Lawyers’ Edition, printed by Lexis, is organized by digest topics and includes Table of Cases volumes. United States Supreme Court Digest is printed in conjunction with the West Key Number System and includes a descriptive word index. Both are updated by pocket part. Supreme Court cases are also included in broader digest series such as West’s Decennial Digest (continued by the General Digest).

B. Free Websites

The Court cautions, “Only the printed bound volumes of the United States Reports contain the final, official opinions of the Supreme Court of the United States.” Nevertheless, in addition to the Court’s own site, opinions are available virtually instantaneously through a variety of online sources. Project Hermes, administered by the Director of Data Systems at the Court since 1990, distributes bench opinions (preceding slip opinions) electronically to a number of universities, media groups, and other subscribers that have agreed to make the opinions available to the public.
Cornell’s Legal Information Institute is one such subscriber, dividing opinions between “1990 to date” (PDF or HTML) and a “historical” selection (HTML only), and contains extensive information about the Court in addition to the text of opinions. A current awareness bulletin, liibulletin, provides the syllabi of decisions handed down that day.
Opinions are available on FDsys in bulk download form for OT 1937-75.
The FindLaw collection covers from 1893 (150 U.S.) to date. It is available only in HTML, but includes helpful search options by party name and keyword in text. LexisOne requires free registration and provides only HTML, but provides full coverage back to 1781.
Note: The dates included in this guide are statements from the respective source. Full date coverage is often stated as one of two relatively distant years, 1754 and 1790, but the scope of case coverage in this gap period is negligible or nonexistent. Reporting of opinions began in 1790 by self-appointed Reporter Alexander J. Dallas, but his first volume gathered approximately thirty cases dating back to 1754, decided prior to the revolution before his home state’s Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. Dallas continued more inclusive reporting from three levels of Pennsylvania courts into volume two. Full coverage sources often include the full volume span produced by Dallas (from 1 U.S. 1, 1 Dall. 1) but describe the time coverage of U.S. Supreme Court cases as “back to 1790.” Since the Supreme Court was not officially established until the Judiciary Act of 1789 and did not meet until its first February Term in 1790 (see 2 U.S. 399, 2 Dall. 399, for the announced establishment of the Court), this scope is not a misnomer. For more information on early reporters, see Morris L. Cohen & Sharon Hamby O’Connor, A Guide to the Early Reports of the Supreme Court of the United States (KF101.8 .C64 1995; also available in HeinOnline’s U.S. Supreme Court Library); Gerald T. Dunn, Early Court Reporters, Supreme Court Historical Society Yearbook, 1976, at 61.

C. Online Databases

Westlaw’s SCT database covers 1790-present; SCT-OLD covers earlier cases from 1790-1944. PDF images from the Supreme Court Reporter are available from volume 1 (1882) to the present, although PDFs of the most recent cases (i.e., those printed in advance sheets or interim editions) are not provided on Westlaw until the case has appeared in the permanent edition of the print volume . Entries link to petitions, briefs, and tables of authorities, when available (see sections below for coverage). SCT-HN searches just the text of headnotes, but covers back to 1790. Westlaw also provides databases searching the opinions and papers of individual current Justices; databases are identified by last name (e.g., Justice David Souter is covered by SOUTER).
Lexis U.S. Supreme Court Cases, Lawyers’ Edition database (GENFED;USLED) dates back to 1790. Entries link to briefs, oral argument transcripts, and secondary resources, when available. GENFED;USDGST allows searching or browsing of the U.S. Supreme Court Digest, Lawyers’ Edition. The full text of opinions for the same time span is available to the general Duke University community through the database LexisNexis Academic.
Another Lexis database, U.S. Supreme Court Case List (GENFED;USLIST), provides a summary of the decision in each case from the current term. The database allows the researcher to select from two paths: view a full list or perform a search.
HeinOnline contains a U.S. Supreme Court Library. Official U.S. Reports are available in PDF in their entirety (from 1754), supplemented by both preliminary prints and slip opinions from the terms not yet printed in permanent volumes. One important feature of HeinOnline is that because PDF images are from the official U.S. Reports volumes, this source incorporates appendices and prefatory material; Westlaw and Lexis print reporters and databases do not.

D. Audio

Until 1930, opinions were announced in their entirety in the courtroom; today, Justices may read from a preliminary syllabus or part of the opinion. Justices occasionally elect to read a concurring or dissenting opinion in the courtroom. The OYEZ Project includes audio of select opinions since 1995 as they are delivered in the courtroom. Case summaries for earlier cases are also available.

IV. Orders

When oral argument is not necessary, or a case can otherwise be adjudicated summarily, the Court releases short dispositions in the form of Orders.
The Supreme Court website has Orders of the Court from October Term 2003 forward. Also included are Opinions Relating to Orders (OT 2004 – ), and Orders by Circuit (OT 2003 – ).
The Findlaw Supreme Court Center, Court Resources link includes orders from OT 1998, with PDF versions available from OT 2000.

V. Briefs

You may be interested in the briefs filed by counsel in relation to the Court’s opinion, in order to see what arguments each side advanced. Briefs from 1832-1978 can be accessed through The Making of Modern Law: U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs Collection.
Briefs for cases from 1920 to the present are available in microfiche in the Microforms Room. The briefs from the 1950 Term on are arranged in docket number order. Before that, they are arranged according to the U.S. Reports citation. We also have a set of books, Landmark Briefs and Arguments of the Supreme Court of the United States: Constitutional Law (Level 3, shelved with the reporters), which contains briefs from selected cases.
If you need briefs from before 1832, the law library at UNC-Chapel Hill has a microform set from 1789 to 1831, Appellate Case Files of the Supreme Court of the United States; materials related to a particular case can be requested through Interlibrary Loan. Note that these files mostly contain agreements of counsel, motions, orders, decrees, judgments, mandates, and correspondence, rather than briefs as we know them today.
Briefs filed by the Office of the Solicitor General are available selectively from OT 1982, at http://www.justice.gov/osg/briefs/index.html#subject. Browsing capability and availability of PDF versions begin with OT 1997. The list feature can also be helpful for older briefs, at http://www.justice.gov/osg/briefs/index.html#oldbriefs.
The Findlaw Supreme Court Center, Court Resources link provides PDF versions of briefs back to OT 1999.
Westlaw SCT-BRIEF-ALL searches all briefs available in several databases, with selected briefs dating back to 1870. SCT-BRIEF covers merits briefs from OT 1990 and amicus briefs from OT 1995. SCT-JA covers select joint appendices from OT 1988.
Lexis U.S. Supreme Court Briefs database and LexisNexis Academic cover select merits briefs from OT 1960. Joint appendices were included prior to OT 1993. Select petitions for Writ of Certiorari are also included.
Neither Lexis nor Westlaw contains complete sets of petitions for certiorari in cases where the Supreme Court did not grant review (although Lexis and LexisNexis Academic have these petitions in civil, white collar criminal, and death penalty cases, and Westlaw offers them from OT 1995 forward), but these are contained in the microfiche set from OT 1985 to the present.

VI. Oral Arguments

Transcripts of oral arguments are available in the library on microfiche and are also available online. For the years 1953 to 1968 we have a set of selected arguments (those that were available on tape or had been transcribed). Since 1969, all oral arguments have been transcribed, and are available in the Microforms Room about 6 to 12 months after the date of the argument.
The OYEZ Project, provides audio for all Court sessions recorded since 1995, as well as select prior cases. The project is working toward complete coverage back to 1955. The library owns a copy of The Supreme Court’s Greatest Hits (KF8741 .A52 2002 CD-ROM), containing 50 oral arguments on CD, taken from the Oyez database. The library also owns May It Please the Court: Live Recordings and Transcripts of Landmark Oral Arguments Made Before the Supreme Court since 1955 (KF8741.A52 M39 2007), featuring MP3 audio CDs and a companion book of selected transcripts.
Westlaw SCT-ORALARG offers transcripts from OT 1990 to the present. Lexis United States Supreme Court Transcripts database covers OT 1979 to the present. Both Lexis and Westlaw receive transcripts from the Court’s authorized contractor.
Landmark Briefs and Arguments of the Supreme Court contains transcripts of oral arguments for most cases therein (not all were available to the publisher). U.S. Law Week publishes summaries or excerpts of selected oral arguments.

VII. Court Rules

The annotated rules are included in the Rules volumes of U.S.C.A. and U.S.C.S. following Title 28. The unannotated rules are published in Title 28 Appendix of the U.S. Code, and are also in Federal Civil Judicial Procedure and Rules (Reserve) and Supreme Court Practice (Reserve). The annotated rules can also be found in volume 17 of the United States Supreme Court Digest, Lawyers’ Edition, updated by pocket part.
Lexis Rules of the Supreme Court database (CODES;SUPRUL) provides Court rules as they appear in the current U.S.C.S. The database allows searches of the full-text of the rules.
Westlaw’s Federal Rules (US-RULES) covers all rules included in Rules volumes of the U.S.C.A., thus the scope of the database is much larger than the Court’s rules. Limit search to the Court by including ci(“s ct rule”) in a Terms & Connectors search to view the 48 rules.
Cornell’s Legal Information Institute provides both an HTML and PDF version of the rules. The HTML version is notable for its table of contents; the list is easy to read and links to the listed rule. The 59-page PDF document is an LII publication, notable for its links to all cross-references including links from its index back into the rules themselves.
For superseded versions of Court rules, the Law Library collection provides the best resources. Rules of the Supreme Court of the United States is available on microfiche, covering 1790-1984. The U.S. Reports provide the rules at the end of the volume associated with the OT in which the rules were passed; “amendments of rules” is noted on the spine.
For more information on court rules generally, see the library’s Court Rules Research Guide.

VIII. Docket Information

Researchers are interested in the Court’s docket for a number of reasons, including the anticipated outcome of a particular case or knowing which cases the Court chooses to hear. One of the best sources for current information on the Court’s docket is U.S. Law Week. The library receives this publication in paper (Reference Indexes, also available through Lexis, Westlaw and BNA Electronic Library) and keeps older editions in Superseded Loose-leaf (Level 1). The dockets for the current and previous terms are also available on the Supreme Court’s website at http://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docket.aspx.
Complementing briefs, the ABA’s Preview of United States Supreme Court Cases offers in-depth discussion of the issues before the Court in select cases. These summaries are written prior to oral argument, and link to the decision on Findlaw after the ruling is handed down. Published seven times during the Term (September-April), the library owns issues back to 1974 (Periodicals). A sample of featured cases is available at http://www.americanbar.org/publications/preview_home.html. Westlaw SCT-PREVIEW covers this publication back to OT 1989; Lexis (ABA;PRE-VU) covers back to OT 1991.
The United States Supreme Court Monitor (free registration required) provides summaries of the current OT as soon as certiorari is granted. In addition, news coverage is gathered from major legal newspapers.
The OYEZ Project follows the pending docket by linking to useful sources. Supreme Court Docket Reports is a monthly newsletter produced by Mayer Brown Rowe & Maw since OT 1997. On the Docket provides reports by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University since OT 1998.
The Findlaw Supreme Court Center, Court Resources link also covers the current docket, with PDF links to oral arguments as they are completed.
Westlaw WLB-SCT provides summaries of current cases on the Court’s docket. SCT-PETITION covers petitions for Writ of Certiorari from OT 1990 for granted petitions and from OT 1995 for petitions denied. The database includes briefs filed with the petitions.

IX. Secondary Sources

The library has a wide selection of secondary source material relating to the Supreme Court. In the General Collection, browse KF8741–45 for information on the Court, as well as KF4546–4747 on substantive subjects the Court handles (Level 2). Stern & Gressman’s Supreme Court Practice (9th ed.) (KF9057 .S8 2007) is a handy reference source. A number of useful books are also available in the Reference Collection.
If you’re interested in a specific Supreme Court justice, see:

• The Supreme Court Justices: Illustrated Biographies, 1789-1995 (Clare Cushman ed., 1995) (Ref. KF8744 .S86 1995);
• Biographical Encyclopedia of the Supreme Court: The Lives and Legal Philosophies of the Justices (Melvin Urofsky, ed.) (Ref KF8744 .B56 2006);
• The Justices of the United States Supreme Court: Their Lives and Major Opinions (Leon Friedman and Fred L. Israel,1995) KF 8744 .F75. This is a five-volume set that concludes with Justice Breyer;
• Memorials of the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States (compiled by Roger Jacobs, 1981) KF8744 .M45. This five-volume set compiles commemorative memorial addresses to 35 Justices;
• The Supreme Court Justices: A Biographical Dictionary (Melvin I. Urofsky ed., 1994) Ref KF8744 .S859 (does not include Justice Breyer);
• Timothy L. Hall, Supreme Court Justices: A Biographical Dictionary (2001) Ref KF8744 .H35 (includes Justice Breyer);
• Oyez: U.S. Supreme Court Multimedia, U.S. Supreme Court Justices: A List of All Supreme Court Justices (includes biographical info);

You can find brief biographies of the current Justices at http://www.supremecourt.gov/about/biographies.aspx and brief biographies of all Justices on an interactive timeline of the Supreme Court at http://www.supremecourt.gov/about/members.aspx. The Supreme Court Historical Society provides an interactive timeline with more expansive biographies of past Justices at http://www.supremecourthistory.org/history-of-the-court/.
A very extensive bibliography on the Supreme Court was published a number of years ago: Fenton S. Martin & Robert U. Goehlert, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Bibliography (1990) (KF8741.A1 M37 1990). Supreme Court of the United States: A Bibliography with Indexes (George Rutland, ed.) (Ref KF8741.A1 R88 2006), partly updates the Martin bibliography with more recent citations.
If you’re looking for a quotation from a Supreme Court case, try the Encyclopedia of Supreme Court Quotations (Christopher A. Anzalone, ed. 2000) (Ref. KF8742.A35 A59 2000 & online). It’s organized by general subject, with a more specific subject index, and also includes a table of cases with short case summaries so you have a context for the quotation.

A. Reference

The Supreme Court Compendium: Data, Decisions & Developments (Lee Epstein, et al., 4th ed.) (Ref. KF8742 .E68 2007) is an excellent source for statistics and quick facts. Voting statistics and case summaries for the previous OT are also reviewed in every November issue of Harvard Law Review (Periodicals, Level 4).
The Supreme Court A to Z (Kenneth Jost ed., 4th ed.) (Ref. KF8742.A35 S959 2007) contains relatively brief alphabetical entries. Guide to the U.S. Supreme Court (David G. Savage, 5th ed.) (2 v.) (Ref. KF8742 .C66 2010) is organized by major topics with a detailed subject index. Both of these also contain lots of photographs.
Landmark Decisions of the United States Supreme Court (Ref. KF4549 .F56 2003 & 2d ed. 2008) provides half-page summaries of approximately 1200 cases, in chronological order.
Biographical Encyclopedia of the Supreme Court: The Lives and Legal Philosophies of the Justices (Melvin Urofsky, ed.) (Ref KF8744 .B56 2006) is current, providing portraits of every Justice and further readings. Additionally, U.S. Reports include memorials to Justices, with “In Memoriam [Justice]” noted on the spine of the appropriate volume.
The ABC-CLIO Supreme Court Handbooks series, published in the last five years, surveys Supreme Court decisions and Justices in a historical context. Titles are structured, “The ______ Court: Justices, Rulings, and Legacy” (Jay and Ellsworth, Chase, Taney, Waite, Fuller, White, Hughes, Taft, Stone, Vinson, Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist are currently available) (KF8742; check catalog for complete call number).
The American Supreme Court (Robert G. McCloskey, 5th ed., revised by Sanford Levinson) (KF8742 .M32 2010). The book provides a history of the Court and its great cases and judicial roles. It includes a detailed bibliography and coverage of institutional and doctrinal studies of the Court.
A People’s History of the Supreme Court (Peter H. Irons) (KF8742 .I76 2006). This book provides a history of the Supreme Court by grounding important constitutional cases in their social and political context.
“History of the Court” in The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States (Kermit L. Hall ed., 2d ed. 2005) (Ref KF8742.A35 O93 2005).
The Illustrated History of the Supreme Court of the United States (Robert Shnayerson, 1986) (KF8742 .S52 1986).
The Documentary History of the Supreme Court of the United States, 1789-1800 (KF8742.A45 D66 1985-1999). This 8-volume set provides the official records, private papers, and other primary sources for the first decade of the Supreme Court. It also includes commentary.
Guide to the Early Reports of the Supreme Court of the United States (Cohen & O’Connor, KF101.8 .C64 1995; also available in HeinOnline’s U.S. Supreme Court Library), includes bibliographies of early reports and biographical summaries of the early Reporters from Dallas to Wallace.
Extensive research guides include Gail Partin, “Web Guide to U.S. Supreme Court Research”.
The Supreme Court Historical Society includes a detailed research guide, “Researching the Supreme Court of the United States.” For information about Supreme Court nominees and the nominations process, consult Georgetown’s Supreme Court Nominations Research Guide.

B. Periodicals

The Law Library collection, Level 4, includes Harvard Law Review (see Nov. issues), Preview (1974-), Supreme Court Debates (1998-), Supreme Court Economic Review (1982-), Supreme Court Historical Society Quarterly (1981-2000), Supreme Court Law Review (1980-), Supreme Court Review (2001-), Supreme Court Watch (1994-), and Supreme Court Historical Society Yearbook (1976-89) which continues as Journal of Supreme Court History (1990-).
Many of these journals are available in full-text online through various subscription databases, such as HeinOnline and Academic Search Premier. Consult the e-Journals search for more information.

C. Blogs

SCOTUSblog began in February 2005 and has grown to include commentary, analysis and news, as well as “Case Files” which link to case documents and calendars.

rev. 09/2011 jws

Index

1. Introduction
2. Supreme Court Website
3. Opinions
   A. Print
   B. Free Websites
   C. Online Databases
   D. Audio
4. Orders
5. Briefs
6. Oral Arguments
7. Court Rules
8. Docket Information
9. Secondary Sources
   A. Reference
   B. Periodicals
   C. Blogs

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Home » Legal Research » Legal Technology » United States Law » Intranets » Court Resources

Features – Web Guide to U.S. Supreme Court Research

By Gail Partin, Published on December 22, 2003

Printer-Friendly Version

Gail A. Partin is an Associate Law Librarian in the Sheely-Lee Law Library at Penn State’s Dickinson School of Law. Her primary responsibility is providing legal research instruction and reference services. As the library’s Foreign, Comparative, and International Law Librarian, she is also responsible for the development and maintenance of the library’s international law collection. Gail has conducted numerous educational seminars on legal research instruction and Internet legal research. She also maintains the Dickinson Legal Research Resources website for her library and publishes the International Criminal Law chapter of the ASIL Guide to Electronic Resources for International Law. She is an active member of AALL’s Foreign, Comparative & International Law SIS and the Research Instruction & Patron Services SIS.

IntroductionResearchers around the globe are demanding up-to-the-minute information on events at the United States Supreme Court. Whether it is for a college or law school seminar, an appellate brief, or a certiorari petition to the Court itself, the Internet plays a central role in delivering this information. The Web is fast, convenient and, for U.S. Supreme Court information, becoming more comprehensive and reliable every day.

The Web Guide to U.S. Supreme Court Research is intended to facilitate the convenience and speed that we expect when turning to the Internet for our research needs. Often, we are unimpressed by the performance of search engines primarily because of problems with the quantity or relevancy of the results. This Web Guide attempts to overcome the shortcomings of general web searching by providing a selection of annotated links to the most reliable, substantive sites for U.S. Supreme Court research. The sites mentioned here focus predominantly on information that is freely, or inexpensively, available on the Internet.

Table of Contents

IntroductionU.S. Supreme Court SitesOfficial Supreme Court SitesOther Supreme Court SitesSupreme Court CasesOpinions Case SummariesBriefsOral ArgumentsCourt DocketJustices of the U.S. Supreme CourtNews & Current AwarenessSupreme Court PracticeCourt AdministrationNews & Current AwarenessSupreme Court HistoryResearch Guides
Focus on the Issues

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U.S. Supreme Court SitesSupreme Court of the United StatesThis is the official web site of the United States Supreme Court. Despite being a relative newcomer to the technology scene (the site was only recently unveiled in 2000), the Court has developed a robust tool for disseminating information. The site provides information about the Court, the justices, Court opinions, Court calendars, practice before the Court, and visits to the Court. Some exciting new features include an automated docket system, access to briefs on the merits for cases awaiting argument, availability of recent opinions within hours of the decision, and the availability (in PDF format) of the complete text of bound volumes of United States Reports. These features and more are described more thoroughly in specific sections of this Web Guide.

Other Supreme Court Sites
Legal Information Institute (LII)
Since its inception in 1992, Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute has firmly secured a reputation as an excellent web site for legal information. The LII’s Supreme Court coverage contributes to that distinguished status with the inclusion of searchable collections of Court opinions, a topically arranged list of case summaries for the current term (http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/03highlts.html), rules, orders, biographical information on the justices, and more. An added feature is the free current awareness service, LII-bulletin (http://www.law.cornell.edu/focus/bulletins.html), that distributes syllabi of Court decisions via e-mail within hours after their release.

FindLaw
Originally launched in 1996 and merged with Thompson/West in 2001, Findlaw continues to be a premier Internet site for legal information. The U.S. Supreme Court page is no exception. It is a comprehensive source for Court information. Court decisions back to 1893 are searchable by name, keyword, date and citation. Docket information for the current and previous terms includes links to case summaries, decisions of lower courts, and briefs where available. Other Court resources include biographical information on the justices, Court calendars, Court history, orders, court rules, and filing guides. An especially useful feature is a free email newsletter containing case summaries as they are handed down.

Supreme Court Monitor
American Lawyer Media’s Law.com provides this information service covering news, oral arguments, orders, and other events at the U.S. Supreme Court. It covers four main areas: news, commentary, decisions, and cert. granted. The News and Commentary sections contain stories on the current court term taken from American Lawyer Media publications. The Decisions section contains summaries of cases decided by the Court since the 1999-2000 term. Cases are arranged by term or by subject. The Cert. Granted section gathers information on pending cases and is arranged by argument date and subject.

Supreme Court Cases
Opinions
Supreme Court of the United States Official Web SiteSlip Opinions
Slip opinions are posted on this Website within hours after the bench opinions. They are issued in PDF format and remain posted until the opinions are published in a bound volume of the United States Reports. Currently coverage includes the most recent three Court terms.
United States Reports bound volumes
The full text is available in PDF format from cover through index, starting with bound volumes 502 et seq., and including all of the opinions, orders, and other materials issued for the Court’s 1991 Term and subsequent years. Additional volumes will be added here after they are published in print form.
Information About Opinions
The Supreme Court’s opinions and related materials are disseminated to the public by means of four printed publications and two computerized services. This publication describes the Court’s publication process.
Where to Obtain Supreme Court Opinions (August 2003) http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/obtainopinions.pdf
This publication “was compiled, and is updated annually, by the staff of the Supreme Court for use by the Court and the public. It is intended to be as complete as possible and includes every opinion issuer of which the staff is aware.” It contains contact information for publishers of print and electronic opinions.
Slip Lists –  http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/sliplists.html
Counsel Listings –  http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/counsellist.html
Case Citation Finder –  http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/casefinder.html
Dates of Early Supreme Court Decisions, 2 Dall through 107 U.S. (PDF)
http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/datesofdecisions.pdf  Other Finding Aids
FindLaw
This is FindLaw’s searchable database of Supreme Court decisions since 1893 (U.S. Reports, vol. 150- ). It is browsable by year and U.S. Reports volume number and searchable by citation, case title and full text. It also includes recent decisions from the current term.

FLITE (Federal Legal Information Through Electronics)
This system contains the full text of 7,407 U.S. Supreme Court Decisions from 1937 to 1975. Two search options are provided: search the full text of decisions by key word or search by party name. It can be accessed through the FedWorld.gov gateway to government information.

lexisONE
This is one of the few places on the Internet to retrieve full-text United States Supreme Court cases for free in its entirety, dating back to 1790. Cases are searchable by citation and keyword, and users have the option of restricting their search by date, parties, judges and counsel. Full display of the text requires registration with lexisONE (a free service).

Legal Information Institute (LII)
LII maintains Supreme Court decisions in two collections:

• Project Hermes: The Court began distributing decisions electronically under the auspices of Project Hermes in 1990. Opinions can be searched by topic, author, or party name.
• Historic Decisions: This collection currently consists of over 600 of the Court’s most important decisions from the founding of the court to the present. LII provides a variety of finding aids with this collection, including lists of cases by opinion author, party name, and topic.
• Highlights of the Current Term: Cases ruled on during the current term are arranged by topic and briefly described. The descriptions provide links to the full opinion, previous opinions, merits briefs, amicus briefs, motions, arguments, articles & commentary, and more related references.
• Searching Decisions by Topic
  Decisions can be searched by choosing any of the 100+ subjects listed here. This set of topic links actually works by executing a search of the syllabi (case summaries) for related key terms.
• Keyword Searching
  Keyword searches can be performed directly in either the syllabi or the full opinions. A search can also be done with words in a case name (or year or docket number) or opinion author.
  Detailed information about the LII’s collections of decisions can be found at http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/supremes.htm. This explanation describes coverage, content, and search strategy.

Supreme Court Monitor
Summaries of cases decided by the Court since the 1999-2000 term are available. Full text decisions are linked from the case summaries and are available at no charge back to the 2000-2001 term. Cases are arranged by term or by practice area.
Summaries of cases decided by the Court since the 1999-2000 term are available. Full text decisions are linked from the case summaries and are available at no charge back to the 2000-2001 term. Cases are arranged by term or by practice area.
USSC Plus
USSC+ is a subscription service providing Supreme Court cases from 1879 to the present; 21,699 cases online (or on CD-ROM). Opinions from the current term are free at http://www.usscplus.com/current/, as is the USSC+ Express Email Digest Service, which provides new opinions within hours of their being handed down.

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Case Summaries
Preview of the United States Supreme Court Cases

Preview is comprised of concise analyses prior to oral argument of every case granted plenary review by the Court. The full text version is available by subscription from the ABA. This web site provides free access to shorter summaries of every case listed for oral argument since the 1999 term via the collections listed below. To facilitate research, the Preview site is keyword searchable, including party name.

Cases at a Glance (http://www.abanet.org/publiced/preview/previewcaseglancehome.html) offers an advance look at the issues raised in every case slated for oral argument since the 1999 term. Links connect to the full text of the Court’s decisions as soon as they are handed down.

Case Summaries (http://www.abanet.org/publiced/preview/sumhome.html) are compiled each summer by identifying the key rulings from every Supreme Court decision handed down throughout the term. These case highlights are then used to arrange the Summaries by topical area. In addition to key rulings, each summary includes the vote breakdown and an excerpt from the majority or plurality opinion.

Cases of Interest to the School Community (http://www.abanet.org/publiced/preview/school/home.html) highlight cases from the recent term in subject areas such as constitutional rights and education law. These summaries provide more information and related resources to meet the needs of the academic community.

Featured Cases (http://www.abanet.org/publiced/preview/features/home.html) are analyses of the issues provided by experts prior to oral argument. These are cases selected for their importance, and excerpted from the full version of Preview.

On the Docket
Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism provides these summaries of cases on the Supreme Court’s docket in partnership with the Oyez Project. The summaries, dating back to the 1998-1999 term, are arranged by issue/subject matter for easy topic searching.

LII-bulletin
This is “a free current awareness service via E-mail, distributing the syllabi of U.S. Supreme Court decisions in bulletin format within hours after their release.” These are not the decisions themselves nor excerpts from them, but summaries (syllabi) prepared by the Court’s Reporter of Decisions.

Willamette Law Online
Willamette Law Online “provides same-day summaries of certiorari granted, oral arguments, and decisions published by the United States Supreme Court.” It functions as a notification system, and as such is not intended to be a substitute for in depth research. “The certiorari summaries focus on the facts and decision from the lower court. The week prior to oral arguments [the service] provides an outline of the issues presented to the Court as argued in the briefs. The decision summaries provide the holding from the United States Supreme Court and a brief overview of the Court’s reasoning.” Cases are categorized by year and coverage starts with the 2001-2002 term. Each summary links to the full text of Supreme Court and lower court decisions via Findlaw. A free email subscription can be obtained by registering at http://lists.willamette.edu/mailman/listinfo/wlo-ussc/.

Supreme Court Monitor
The Cert. Granted section gathers information on and provides case summaries for pending cases. Cases are arranged by scheduled argument date and by practice area.

Appellate.Net
This service is provided by the nation’s oldest and largest Supreme Court and Appellate Practice Group, Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw, LLP. The site collects information, news, and links relevant to Supreme Court and appellate practice, as well as oral arguments and articles about cases or issues handled by the firm in recent years. The site includes a newsletter, Supreme Court Docket Reports, which describes all cases of interest to the business community in which the Supreme Court grants certiorari.

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Briefs
Supreme Court of the United States Official Web Site
To access briefs choose the link to On-Line MERITS BRIEFS, which connects to Preview of United States Supreme Court Cases (http://www.abanet.org/publiced/preview/briefs/home.html) on ABAnet (American Bar Association web site). Coverage includes merits briefs (less amici curiae briefs and joint appendices) filed in cases slated for oral argument. Briefs may be accessed either by argument date or case name.

Where To Find Briefs of the Supreme Court of the U.S. (October 2003, rev.) - http://supremecourtus.gov/oral_arguments/briefsource.pdf, is a Court publication that describes a variety of sources for obtaining briefs, including complete contact information for document retrieval services, brief depositories, and the Court’s self-service program.

FindLaw: Supreme Court Briefs
Selected party and amicus briefs are available in PDF format for cases granted certiorari from 1999 – present. The briefs are organized by term and alphabetically by first-party case name.

Office of the Solicitor General (OSG)
This site provides access to briefs (other than responses in “in forma pauperis” (IFP) cases) filed by the Solicitor General. Coverage (http://www.usdoj.gov/osg/briefs/help.html#coverage) includes selected briefs from 1982-1996 and all filings (except IFP) since July, 1998. Briefs are grouped by the Supreme Court term during which they are filed and are searchable by keyword, type, or subject.

Briefserve
Coverage includes briefs from the 1984 term to the present. The Brieflist provides the filing date, a brief description of the document, and an abstract of the case. The database is searchable by keyword, case name, or docket number. Briefs are delivered in PDF format. The cost is $25.00 per brief with a minimum order of two documents. The page also provides links to the Court’s website for Court calendars, Cert. Granted cases, Court opinions, Court rules, forms and guidelines.

Yale University – Curiae Project
The Curiae Project provides records and briefs and other relevant materials for selected, highly cited, U.S. Supreme Court cases. “Cases are selected for addition to the site based on a ranking developed from citation data in historical and constitutional texts.” Examples include commonly cited cases such as, Marbury vs. Madison (1803), Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), and Brown v. Board of Education I (1954) and II (1955). Briefs for over 1000 cases are available. All briefs are available in PDF format.

Taming the Knee-jerk Reaction: Locating U.S. Supreme Court Briefs by Diane D’Angelo, Reference Librarian (December 2001) at http://www.law.suffolk.edu/library/newsletter/01dec/01dec5.html.

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Oral Arguments
Oyez Project: U.S. Supreme Court Multimedia Database
The Oyez Project’s most noteworthy contribution is certainly its collection of digital audio files of Supreme Court oral arguments. Cases are arranged by subject, each accompanied by an abstract of the decision, links to audio files of oral arguments and oral opinions, participation levels of each justice, and links to the full text opinion. Users can search by case name, citation, subject or date. The site also has links to Supreme Court opinions, biographies and portraits of Justices, voting records, digital recordings of speeches by justices, and a “virtual tour” of the Supreme Court Building.

In June, 2003 the Oyez Project, working in conjunction with the Creative Commons organization, released the first of several sets of Supreme Court oral audio files in MP3 format. The license allows listeners to download, share, and create derivative works using these audio files.

Supreme Court of the United States Official Web Site
The Court provides transcripts of oral arguments that are posted on this Website within 10-15 business days after the close of the argument session. This site is the permanent archive for transcripts and includes the cases argued during October Term 2000 and subsequent Court Terms. Transcripts are listed by argument date/session, then by docket number.

Transcripts of cases more recent than those posted here can be purchased from Alderson Reporting Company at (202) 289-2260, or www.aldersonreporting.com.

Transcripts and Recordings of Oral Arguments (October 2003)
http://www.supremecourtus.gov/oral_arguments/availabilityoforalargumenttranscripts.pdf is a Court publication that explains the process for recording and transcription of oral arguments. It describes sources for print, electronic, CD-ROM, and microform transcripts.

The Supreme Court Enters the Internet Age: The Court and Technology by Roy M. Mersky and Kumar Percy (June 1, 2000)
This article describes the evolution of the Court’s policies on the use of technology to access opinions and arguments. Especially interesting is the description of the circumstances leading to the Court’s shift in policy and the role played by Peter Irons and Stephanie Guitton, editors of the groundbreaking audio publication, May it please the court : the most significant oral arguments made before the Supreme Court since 1955, recordings of historic arguments on six cassettes.

Court Docket, Order Lists & Calendar
Supreme Court of the United States Official Web Site

Calendars

This page provides the Court schedule, Court calendar, argument calendars, day call, hearing lists, and the granted/noted cases lists for the two most recent terms.

Order Lists

Court orders since October Term 2000 are available.

Automated Docket System

The automated docket system is the Court’s case tracking system. It contains information about cases, both pending and decided, for both the current Term and the prior Term. Users can search for cases by using a Supreme Court docket number, a lower court docket number, or a case name. Information on the docket is updated on the day after an entry is made on the docket.

Oyez: The Pending Docket

This is a listing of all Supreme Court cases that have been argued, but not decided nor reargued. It is arranged chronologically by argument date and provides a case abstract which eventually links to audio files, full text opinions and other resources.

Legal Information Institute (LII)

The LII site provides comprehensive coverage of docket and calendar information. Under Current Awareness in the left column of the LII Home Page, there are headings for “Case updates…” and “Orders…” each of which displays a menu of links from which to choose.  “Case updates” leads to separate pages for:

· Cases pending oral argument (

http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/oral_arg_calendar.php

)

· Cases argued this term (

http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/oral_arg_calendar.php?begin=20011001&end=2002063

)

· Supreme Court calendar (PDF) (

http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/oral_arg_calendar

)

“Orders” leads to separate pages for:

· Orders this month (

http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/orderlists.php

)

· Searching the database of the Court’s Order Lists by party name, date, or docket number

http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/orderinquiry.php

 

FindLaw

Docket information is available for the current and previous terms and includes questions presented, case summaries, decisions of lower courts, and briefs. Cases can be browsed by month. Court calendars and order lists are available back to the 1998 term and include orders in pending cases, grants and denials of certiorari, mandamus, and rehearings, and attorney discipline orders.

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Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court
Supreme Court of the United States Official Web Site
Biographies of the Current Justices

 

-http://www.supremecourtus.gov/about/biographiescurrent.pdf

 

Speeches – http://www.supremecourtus.gov/publicinfo/speeches/speeches.html

 

Members of the Court (1789 to present) – http://www.supremecourtus.gov/about/members.pdf

 

The Justices Caseload –

 

http://www.supremecourtus.gov/about/justicecaseload.pdf

 

Circuit Assignment of Justices -

 

http://www.supremecourtus.gov/about/allotment.pdf

 

The Supreme Court: Research Guide and Bibliography

by Gail A. Partin (updated annually, each Spring).

This site contains two separate bibliographies covering information on the justices:

· Current Justices Bibliography: compilation of citation information for articles, books, media and microform resources written by or about each of the current justices on the Court. Entries include transcripts of nomination hearings, videotaped interviews, periodical and magazine articles, news stories, and books.

· Former Justices Bibliography: Bibliographies for justices that have recently departed from the Court are provided here. Although these bibliographies have not been extensively updated since the date that each justice left the Court, they are still quite useful for locating historical information.

Oyez: Justices

This page supplies pictures and biographical information for all of the justices back to 1789. It includes background and biographical information, other resources, and links to every opinion written by the justice.

Legal Information Institute (LII) – Gallery of Justices

This page provides a photograph, biographical information, and links to judicial opinions written by each of the current justice.

FindLaw: Supreme Court Justices

Extensive biographical information is provided for current and past justices. Brief summaries are linked to more extensive biographies, which, in turn, link to related biographical sources such as newspapers, encyclopedias, and other judicial or Supreme Court web sites.

Louis D. Brandeis collection -http://library.louisville.edu/law/brandeis/

 

John Marshall Harlan Collection-http://www.louisville.edu/library/law/harlan/

 

The University of Louisville School of Law Library holds the papers of both of these Supreme Court justices. The Library has indexed and cataloged the collections and provided searchable guides to the public on their web site. Contact information is available for interlibrary loan requests.

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News & Commentary
Washington Post

The Washington Post maintains a separate news page for U.S. Supreme Court issues, highlighting key articles and cases back to 1996. The page also includes a section on Cases To Watch in the current term and links to Supreme Court quizzes for 2001-2003.

Full Court Press

, by Charles Lane, reports on news and trends inside the Supreme Court on the first Monday of every month. Columns online date back to 1999.

Supreme Court Monitor

The News and Commentary sections contain stories on the current court term taken from American Lawyer Media publications. Summaries of articles are arranged chronologically, with links to the full story. News wire content can be searched for the previous six months (

http://store.law.com/newswire_search.asp

), although a subscription is required to read the full text of these articles.

Jurist

Includes stories from major national newspapers and commentary from legal scholars.

C-SPAN: Judiciary Resources

This site provides links to resources about the Supreme Court, along with video and audio clips of Q&A Sessions with Justices and Profiles of Justices. The link to the C-SPAN series, America and the Courts, also provides video clips of interviews, speeches, and conferences involving the justices or the Court. Media player software is required to run the clips and downloading can be cumbersome due to the large size of some files. However, when the download is successful, the quality of sound, picture, and content are worth the effort.

CNN: Law/SCOTUS

Coverage of Supreme Court issues and newsworthy cases extends back to early August, 2003. A site search engine, powered by Google, is available for locating older articles. A sample search for U.S. Supreme Court yielded over 800 stories dating back to 1995.

Yahoo News Full Coverage – Supreme Court News

Includes feature articles, opinions & editorials, and news stories from a variety of national news sources. The

Supreme Court News Archive

offers older articles back to 1998.

USA Today

Using the site search feature seems to be the most efficient method of retrieving stories on the Court. Articles are archived back to 1998.

Supreme Court Practice
U.S. Supreme Court Official Web Site

Supreme Court Rules of Court
This is the most recent revision to the Rules of the Supreme Court of the United States. Included here are the full set of rules and a publication explaining the most recent revisions.

Case Handling Guides
Guides are available in PDF format for filing paid cases, for filing in forma pauperis cases, and for counsel in cases to be argued.
Bar Admission Instructions & Forms

The Court and Its Procedures

Legal Information Institute (LII)

The most recent version of the Supreme Court Rules is up-to-date and searchable in its PDF format. This site also provides the text of constitutional provisions establishing the court, statutory clauses pertaining to the Court’s jurisdiction and organization.

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Court Administration
U.S. Supreme Court Official Web Site

Chief Justice’s Year End Reports of the Federal Judiciary (2000-present)

The Justices Caseload
Circuit Assignment of Justices
The Court and Its Procedures
Public Information
This page includes press releases, media advisories, career opportunities, fellowships, externships, volunteer opportunities, speeches by the justices since May 2000 (http://www.supremecourtus.gov/publicinfo/speeches/speeches.html), and information on the Supreme Court Building Modernization Project (http://www.supremecourtus.gov/publicinfo/modernization/home.htm).

The Supreme Court Enters the Internet Age: The Court and Technology

by Roy M. Mersky and Kumar Percy (June 1, 200).

The Third Branch: the Newsletter of the Federal Courts

Supreme Court History

U.S. Supreme Court Official Web SiteA Brief Overview of the Supreme Court

Visiting the Court

This page on the Court’s web site includes information pertaining to the services available to visitors. It also includes a visitor’s guide to the supreme court, a visitor’s guide to oral argument, a brief history of the building, architectural information, and a collection of building photographs.

The Court as an Institution

The Court and Its Traditions

The Court and Constitutional Interpretation

Supreme Court Historical Society

“The Supreme Court Historical Society is dedicated to the preservation and dissemination of the history of the Supreme Court of the United States” through a variety of educational programs, lecture series, publications and this web site. The website includes the following features:

Historical Features

These high quality video clips cover specific themes or eras in the Court’s history. For example, a recent feature clip was, FDR & the Court Packing Controversy.

Timeline of the Justices

Brief biography and photograph of each former justice.

The Current Court

Brief biography and photograph of each sitting justice.

History of the Court

Summarizes the events and highlights of the Court under each Chief Justice beginning with the Jay Court in 1789 through the current Rehnquist Court.

Homes of the Court

An historical review of the various locations and buildings where the Court presided since its inception.

Court History Quizzes

Four short quizzes, with answers provided, written by James B. O’Hara.

Oyez: On This Day in History

This page provides information about what occurred at the U.S. Supreme Court on a particular day in the past.

Oyez Virtual Tour of the Supreme Court Building

Architect of the Capitol: The Old Supreme Court Chamber

The Old Supreme Court Chamber is the first room constructed for the use of the nation’s highest judicial body. This page contains the history of the building including interior photographs.

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Research Guides
The Supreme Court: Research Guide and Bibliography

by Gail A. Partin (updated annually each Spring).

This site contains three separate publications:

· Research Guide: identifies print and electronic resources that facilitate Supreme Court research.

· Current Justices Bibliography: compilation of citation information for articles, books, media and microform resources written by or about each of the current justices on the Court. Entries include transcripts of nomination hearings, videotaped interviews, periodical and magazine articles, news stories, and books.

· Former Justices Bibliography: Bibliographies for justices that have recently departed from the Court are provided here. Although these bibliographies have not been extensively updated since the date that each justice left the Court, they are still quite useful for locating historical information.

Jurist

The Supreme Court page provides a bibliography of links to news, scholarly commentary, opinions, oral arguments, the Court’s docket, information about the justices, and more.

Researching the Supreme Court of the United States

by Jill Ann Duffy and Elizabeth Ardella Laub Lambert (2000).

October 2000 Supreme Court Term: What’s New on the Internet

by Roger V. Skalbeck (November 15, 2000).

U.S. Supreme Court Research – Select Internet Sites

by Elizabeth Lambert (May 15, 2002).

Zimmerman’s Research Guide: United States Supreme Court

This is a practical guide to finding Supreme Court materials either in print or online.

Focus on the Issues
Many Supreme Court watchers choose to monitor specific issues as they unfold. This section focuses on broad topics that regularly arise in the Supreme Court. There are a plethora of subject-specific web pages spotlighting constitutional or Supreme Court matters, so this listing is, and will remain, extremely selective. The two major criteria for inclusion here are that these web sites must objectively present their materials and exhibit no signs of bias.FindLaw: Hot Topics

Findlaw provides scholarly articles, commentary, and brief reviews of issues that remain at the forefront of Supreme Court developments. Areas spotlighted are:

Abortion

Bill of Rights – First Amendment

Bill of Rights – Fourth Amendment

Bill of Rights – Fifth Amendment

Bill of Rights – Eighth Amendment

Civil Rights / Discrimination

Criminal Law / Procedure

Elections

Federal Agencies

Federalism

Immigration

Supremacy Clause

Supreme Court

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Criminal Law
Criminal Law Decisions since the 1998-1999 Term

Decisions from 1998 to the present are arranged by subject and/or constitutional amendment.

Criminal Law and Procedure Decisions of the October 2000-2001 Supreme Court Term by Solomon L. Wisenberg of Ross, Dixon & Bell, L.L.P at

http://sol.lp.findlaw.com/all.html

. Separate articles cover the 1998-1999 and 1999-2000 terms as well.

Education Law

Preview: Cases of Interest to the School Community

This site highlights cases from the recent term in subject areas such as constitutional rights and education law. The summaries provide more information and related resources to meet the needs of the academic community.

First Amendment

First Amendment Center

The First Amendment Center is an operating program of the Freedom Forum and is affiliated with the Newseum and with Vanderbilt University through the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies. The Center’s web site features “comprehensive research coverage of key First Amendment issues and topics, a unique First Amendment Library and guest analyses by respected legal specialists.”

1st Amendment Online

This web site, based at the University of Minnesota Law School, is “dedicated to publicly accessible information, ideas, and images concerning the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.” It contains academic materials, First Amendment cases, news, primary sources, historical materials, and public opinion polls relating to First Amendment issues.

Religious Liberty
The Establishment “Claus”: A Selective Guide to the Supreme Court’s Christmas Cases

by Stephen Young. (December 16, 2002). This Guide outlines the Court’s decisions that have focused on the public display of symbols of the Christmas holiday season.

Intellectual Property

Internet Library of Law and Court Decisions

The Internet Law Library, authored by Martin H. Samson, a partner at Phillips Nizer LLP, “features extensive summaries of over 310 court decisions shaping the law of the web; providing facts, analysis and pertinent quotes from cases of interest to those involved in New Media addressing copyright, trademark, dilution and other intellectual property issues, jurisdiction, linking, framing, meta tags, clip-art, defamation, domain name, e-mail, encryption, gambling, click-wrap agreements, shrink-wrap licenses, spamming and other subjects.” The site provides brief synopses of court decisions, indexed alphabetically by subject matter. Click on the case title for a more thorough analysis of the court’s decision, and, where available, its full text. The site can also be searched via a full text search engine.

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Dorraine Zief Law Library » LibGuides » U.S. Supreme Court Research

U.S. Supreme Court Research   Tags: federal research, u.s. supreme court

Find information about the Court, its justices and its cases. Get opinions, briefs, argument transcripts, and the latest news.

Last Updated: Jun 6, 2012 URL: http://legalresearch.usfca.edu/SupremeCourtResearch Print Guide RSS Updates

• Overview
• News
• Pending Cases
• Opinions
• Briefs & Petitions
• Oral Arguments
• The Justices
• Books
• Articles
• Statistics

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In This Guide…

This guide covers:

• news about the Court
• pending case information
• opinions
• briefs and petitions
• oral argument transcripts
• justices – biographies and other information
• books and articles about the court
• statistical information about the Court.

For advice specific to your research, ask a research librarian at the Zief Library Research Desk, or call 415.422.6773.

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Getting Started

Start here, with…

• Best web sites about the Supreme Court
• Great introductory books about the Supreme Court

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Best Web Sites

• Supreme Court of the United States
  The official web site of the Court. Offers: same-day slip opinions; the current docket; oral argument transcripts; merit briefs (via the ABA); court rules; case handling guides; calendars and schedules; public and visitor information.
• SCOTUSblog
  Not just a blog! SCOTUSblog also has or links to opinions, oral argument transcripts and audio, and statistical information.
• Justia’s U.S. Supreme Court Center
  Links to opinions, news, constitutional law blogs, and other resources on the Court.
• Cornell Legal Information Institute’s Supreme Court Collection
  Opinions and other information, such as orders, calendars, and case updates (including oral argument previews)
• Oyez – U.S. Supreme Court Media
  The “authoritative source for all audio recorded in the Court since the installation of a recording system in October 1955,” plus information about the court, its opinions, and its justices, the Oyez Baseball quiz, and a Podcast of newly-added media.
• Supreme Court Historical Society
  Profiles of justices, historical sketches, documentaries, teaching materials, selected content from the Journal of Supreme Court History, and a PDF guide on Researching the Court.
• Solicitor General of the U.S.
  The Solicitor General “supervise[s] and conduct[s] government litigation in the United States Supreme Court.” The site includes Supreme Court briefs filed by the Solicitor General and historical information.

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Best Introductory Books

These books cover the Court’s procedures, history, and justices, and can lead you to further, more detailed, research resources.

The Supreme Court A to Z, 4th ed. – Kenneth Jost, ed.

Call Number: KF 8742 .A35 S8 2007 Law Reference

Lengthy alphabetical entries discussing justices or defining terms (e.g., “assigning opinions,” “docket,” “Solicitor General”), and concepts (e.g., “incorporation doctrine,” “political question”) .

The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States – Kermit Hall, et al., eds.

Call Number: KF 8742 .A35 O93 2005 Law Reference

Short alphabetically-arranged essays on people, cases, concepts and doctrines (e.g., “federalism”), statutes, etc. Includes suggestions for further reading. (Available to the USF community via Oxford Reference Online (ORO). Connect to ORO, select “Law” from the “Subject Reference” list, then select “The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States.”)

Guide to the U.S. Supreme Court, 5th ed. – David G. Savage

Call Number: KF 8742 .W567 2010 Law Reference

A more elaborate, two-volume version of The Supreme Court at Work, below. Covers much of the same ground but in greater detail.

The Supreme Court at Work, 2d ed. – Joan Biskupic & Elder Witt

Call Number: KF 8742 .S912 1997 Law Reference

Covers: history; operation; traditions; people; courtrooms; cost; members of the court. Appendix includes documents, tables, data, lists (e.g., of Acts of Congress held unconstitutional).

Landmark Decisions of the United States Supreme Court, 2d ed. – Paul Finkelman & Melvin I. Urofsky

Call Number: KF 4549 .F56 2008 Law Reference

Succinct summaries of the cases, with suggestions for further research.

Encyclopedia of the American Constitution, 2d ed. – Leonard W. Levy & Kenneth L. Karst, eds.

Call Number: KF 4548 .E53 2000 Law Reference

Thorough scholarly articles about cases, concepts, justices, suggestions for further research.

Supreme Court Practice, 9th ed. – Eugene Gressman, et al.,

Call Number: KF 9057 .S8 2007 Law Open Reserve

Covers in detail: the Court’s jurisdiction to review decisions of state and federal courts; the process by which the Court decides whether to grant cert.; specific procedures for handling appeals. (Published by BNA in 2007.)

How to Research the Supreme Court – Fenton S. Martin & Robert Goehlert

Call Number: KF 8741 .A1 M36 1992 Law Reference

Thorough discussion of strategies and resources. Contains a selected bibliography of major works covering all aspects of the Court and its work.

Supreme Court of the United States: A Bibliography with Indexes – George H.Rutland, ed.

Call Number: KF 8741 .A1 R883 2006 Law Reference

Extensive bibliography with hundreds of citations to important literature dealing with the Court.

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Research Librarian

Lee Ryan Contact Info Zief Law Library, Rm. 103 415-422-2253 Send Email Links: Website / Blog Profile & Guides Subjects: International Law, Foreign Law, Federal Research, California Research

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