Curiae: Digitizing U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs

Yale University, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

This project will digitize historic records and briefs of the United States Supreme Court, and make them available to the public through the Project's web site and database, at http://curiae.law.yale.edu. The Project web site will provide public access to electronic versions of more than 2,000 records and briefs from the 300 most important U.S. Supreme Court cases in American history. Over 150,000 pages of materials will be provided through a user-friendly interface, supported by what will be the most complete, publicly accessible database of historic U.S. Supreme Court records and briefs to date. Briefs and oral arguments presented to the Supreme Court provide crucial information to scholars, to legal practitioners, and to the public at large as they seek to understand America's historic constitutional battles and Supreme Court decisions. Unfortunately, the public has highly inadequate access to these valuable materials. Bound print versions of these materials are rare, difficult to locate, and continue to be subject to significant damage through use; on-line versions do not provide access to the bulk of the most significant case materials and are often costly to use. The web site and documents will be searchable both full-text and by individually-indexed fields at the project site, in addition to through public search engines. All documents will be freely available to all users. Initial case selection will be made based on citation information in historical studies of the Supreme Court and constitutional law casebooks. Copies of the briefs, oral arguments, and related materials will then be transferred to electronic format by a data conversion service. The files produced by the service will be located on the Yale University institutional web server. The accessibility of these materials will not only save researchers time, but will encourage and allow research and analysis that would not otherwise have been undertaken.