The Appeals Court Database Project was designed to create an extensive dataset to facilitate the empirical analysis of the votes of judges and the decisions of the U.S. Courts of Appeals. In order to increase its utility for a wide variety of potential users, data on a broad range of variables of theoretical significance to public law scholars were coded. A major concern of the Board of Overseers appointed to advice Donald R. Songer (PI) was to insure the collection of data over a sufficiently long period of time to encourage significant longitudinal studies of trends over time in the courts. The paucity of such studies in the past was identified as one of the major weaknesses of recent scholarship. Thus, the database was designed to code a random sample of cases since 1925. This year marks the beginning of an increased policy role for the courts of appeals brought about by the increase in discretionary power of the Supreme Court over its docket and also marks the beginning of the second series of the Federal Reporter. Datasets are available in several formats. Note, all files have been zipped to reduce download time. If you do not have a program (such as WinZip or PKZip) please click here to download free zip software. Additionally, some Mac users may require the program Stuff-It Expander to open the datasets. If you do not have this program, please click here. Finally, all documentation is provided in Adobe pdf format. To get a free version of Adobe Acrobat please click here.

Original Appeals Court Database (1925-1996)

SPSS file (formatted as a SPSS portable file)

STATA file (formatted as a .dta file)

SAS file (formatted as a SAS transport file)

ASCII file (formatted as a fixed ASCII .dat file)

Documentation (in .pdf format)

Information on weighting cases (in .pdf format)

Update to the Appeals Court Database (1997-2002)

Thanks to the efforts of Ashlyn K. Kuersten of Western Michigan University and Susan B. Haire of the University of Georgia, the original Appeals Court Database has been updated to include case data from 1997-2002.

Last Update: August 13, 2007

SPSS file (formatted as a SPSS portable file)

STATA file (formatted as a .dta file)

SAS file (formatted as a SAS transport file)

Documentation (in .pdf format)

Information on weighting cases (in .pdf format)

Updated Appeals Court Judgelist (an EXCEL file with recent judge code information)

Update Judge List (a Word file with recent judge code information)

Merged Court of Appeals Data (1925-2002)

Thanks to Ashlyn K. Kuersten of Western Michigan University for combining the original Appeals Court Dataset with the most recent update. For information on specific variables/coding please refer to the codebooks above.

Last Update: October 21, 2008

SPSS file (formatted as a SPSS portable file)

STATA file (formatted as a .dta file)

SAS file (formatted as a SAS transport file)

Phase II Courts of Appeals Database

Compiled by Donald R. Songer at the University of South Carolina, this dataset includes all appeals court cases that were subsequently reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court (and therefore coded in the Spaeth Supreme Court dataset). Consequently, this dataset provides the 'bridge' cases between the original Songer Appeals Court database and the Spaeth Supreme Court (allcourt) dataset. For information on specific variables/coding please refer to the Courts of Appeals documentation listed above.

Last Update: October 21, 2008

SPSS file (formatted as a SPSS portable file)

STATA file (formatted as a .dta file)

SAS file (formatted as a SAS transport file)

Flipped Appeals Court Database

Thanks to Ashlyn K. Kuersten of Western Michigan University and Todd Curry, Ph.D. student at Western Michigan University, for changing the unit of analysis from case-centered to individual judge-centered. For information on specific variables/coding please refer to the codebooks above.

Last Update: October 29, 2008

SPSS file (formatted as a SPSS portable file)

STATA file (formatted as a .dta file)

SAS file (formatted as a SAS transport file)