Researching The Supreme Court
Maggie Henry writes:
This week, I’m sharing a bit about my archive research and how it has progressed. I’ll begin with a little background on what direction my project has moved in (and indeed, it has moved!) Since I submitted my proposal and wrote last week’s blog, I have had the chance to review Professor Silbey’s comments and think a little bit more about shaping my argument. This, in turn, has impacted what archives I am going to use extensively. I’ve decided to focus on solely rearguments that have taken place during the Roberts Court. While towards the end of the paper I will set the cases in the larger context of SCOTUS decisions, I think a historical examination and analysis of the individual cases makes the most valuable contribution.
For starters, I’ll tell share some about an archive that ended up being less helpful than I had hoped. Professor Silbey commented that I was still thinking like a political science major and unfortunately, not yet like a student of history. (ed note: she was) Spaeth’s Expanded United States Supreme Court Judicial Database is an incredible resource providing a wealth of information on SCOTUS decision-making. That being said, reargument orders don’t seem to have been a metric that Spaeth’s very comprehensive database considers. I’m going to speak to him by e-mail as the spring continues as his work still represents a veritable wealth of information on Supreme Court decisions, but I’m not sure that this will be an appropriate database for me to focus on. Furthermore, since it’s a political science database, it doesn’t highlight discrepancies but rather identifies trends in decision-making across time. By virtue of my proposal, I want to look at the particulars and unique factors of each Roberts Court reargument. Clearly this database will help me place my cases in the larger context of how SCOTUS makes decisions, but will not be a place to actually research my topic.
Instead, I need to focus on using my primary source archives from the Supreme Court’s own annals. I was able to use the online Supreme Court archives to download transcripts of the oral arguments for the various reargued cases under Roberts and begin perusing them. Unfortunately I could not make it to the Supreme Court stacks in the Law Library at the Library of Congress this week, though I was able to speak to a librarian on the phone and arrange a meeting time in a week and a half. She will be able to share less than obvious sources with me. In the meantime, I have been researching those archives through the Library of Congress website. Unlike the SCOTUS website, which mainly has digitized transcripts of oral arguments from 2000 on, the Library of Congress actually has the texts of briefs lawyers present to the justices. While they only have them for some cases, they have them for Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, one of the biggest cases I will study this semester. Since briefs change from argument to reargument, they are frequent indicators of the new scope of a reargued case. I look forward to using these more extensive records to divulge reasons why the justices might have encouraged a reargument.
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