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Why Should Lawyers Care About Institutional Data On Courts?, Maxwell L. Stearns

Maxwell L. Stearns

In the “U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Data Base: providing new insights into the Courts,” Professors Harold Spaeth and Jeffrey Segal provide a brief and valuable overview of the two Supreme Court databases, with a particular focus on how those databases might be of use to those with professional legal training, namely law professors, lawyers, and perhaps also judges. In this comment, I will describe what I consider to be the limitations, and uses, of such data for those of us trained in law, and who most likely will lack the rigorous social science background familiar to most present users of …