New Database: CQ Press Supreme Court Collection

The Kathrine R. Everett Law Library has just acquired the CQ Press Supreme Court Collection, a new research database, available to the entire UNC community. The CQ Press Supreme Court Collection provides a wide variety of materials related to the United States Supreme Court, including case summaries, justice profiles, analysis of the history and traditions of the court, term overviews, a glossary of legal terms, and much more.

Researchers may find these materials useful in a number of ways. Justice profiles provide brief biographies of justices, including education, other official positions, and information about their supreme court service. Each has a biographical essay and data on their participation in cases. For example, the databases tracks Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as participating in 2162 cases and breaks those cases down into categories like the number of times she joined with the majority, dissented, concurred, concurred in the judgment, and several other options. The site provides a link to a list of each set of cases. The site also provides a list of the opinions she authored and more information about her participation in key cases. There are further articles about many aspects of the court and each justice. For Justice Ginsburg, researchers can read about different aspects of her nomination process, including specifics of questioning and the process of nominating her and Justice Breyer.

Beyond information on individual justices and cases, the CQ Press Supreme Court Collection also gives researchers several ways to analyze collective actions of the court. Court reports provide information on various topics, mostly recently like the court’s treatment of originalism, the future of nominee hearings, term limits debates, the shadow docket, and more. The site’s data analysis tools provide ways to examine the roles that each justice plays in the case, opinion writing, opinion alignment, and voting bloc analysis. Each can be organized by justice, constitutional area, and law and society topic.

Researchers can navigate the site in various ways. The search function allows some terms and connectors searching, including AND, OR, and NOT to structure results. Results can be sorted by relevance and date. The site also allows for multiple ways to browse materials, and materials accessed on the site can be downloaded or emailed in PDF format. CQ Press also provides automatic citations in four different formats.

The CQ Press Supreme Court Collection can be accessed from the law library’s Subscription Database page, under “Proxy Access.” UNC community members are encouraged to take a look today and explore this new addition to UNC’s legal information resources.