Lone Dissent

Up until March 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court’s list of transcripts for the 1973 Term included the following transcripts from July 1974:

U.S. Supreme Court Briefs are important historical documents, but finding them isn’t always easy, and not everyone is near one of the handful of official depositories where the Supreme Court sends all its extra briefs. In fact, now that the Court appears to have fully embraced electronic document submission, the days of printed briefs may soon be coming to an end.

In March 2005, on my first (and last) visit to the U.S. Supreme Court Library, with librarian Brian Stiglmeier’s help, I was able to browse their small collection of early transcripts and duplicate a few of them. All the copies I made are available under Transcripts.

The U.S. Supreme Court began recording oral arguments in October 1955 on reel-to-reel tapes that it would later send to the National Archives. Normally, such tapes are considered “masters” which are stored in special climate-controlled rooms and which no one is permitted to touch – unless of course they work there.

The Supreme Court Database, aka SCDB*, is a enormously valuable resource. Other sites have even referred to it as “the gold standard for high-quality legal information.” It owes much of its reputation to Harold Spaeth, a political science professor who created “The Original U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Database (nickname: ALLCOURT)” decades ago, and worked with the SCDB folks to help produce the modern version. Sadly, Harold passed away in 2017.

One of our long-term goals is to produce a more accurate and comprehensive list of Top Supreme Court Advocates. But to do that, we need lots of data – lots of good data.

Recently, I took renewed interest in an old topic: lawyers who have argued the most cases at the U.S. Supreme Court, aka Top Advocates.

When is a Lone Dissent not a Lone Dissent? When multiple Lone Dissents are handed down on the same day.

When the gulp loners task is run for all available terms:

We just ran our new gulp loners task:

In preparation for building this website, a few important data files were created first: