Lone Dissent

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 the cornerstones of good data is being able to cross-reference it with lots of other data, so to that end, this repository now contains text extracted from all the U.S. Reports downloaded from the Library of Congress, along with text extracted from all the Transcripts downloaded from the U.S. Supreme Court website, and all Case Data (from the 1955 term onward) extracted from the Oyez website.

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 making this a more interesting website, a few important data files have been created so far: