The Judicial Research Initiative (JuRI)
at the University of South Carolina
National High Courts Database
The
High Courts
Judicial Database
was created with the support of grants from the
Law and Social Science Program of the National Science Foundation. It is a
public access database, freely available for use by any interested person. The
principal investigators note that all decisions regarding the structure and
interpretation of the data used to create the HCJD are their own, and do not
reflect the views or positions of the National Science Foundation
The High Courts Judicial Database (HCJD) provides coded information on
the content of universes or random samples of the decisions produced by eleven
of the top ("High" or "Supreme") courts of the world's judicial systems for
extended periods of time. The decisions included in the database are those
formally reported in the reporters of record in each country.
The High Courts
Judicial Database consists of (1) a single All Nations Master File that includes
all variables coded in common for all nations and (2) eleven individual country
master files that include the common variables as well as variables that are
specific to individual countries. Most of the country specific variables record
aspects of the voting and opinion behaviors of the individual justices who
served on the country’s top court during the period covered, but individual
country master files sometimes contain additional variables recording country
specific information.
The countries, courts, and actual years currently covered are:
The principal investigators request that those
using these data fully and properly acknowledge their source. The following
would be an appropriate form for such an acknowledgement:
Finally, we note that the HCJD remains a work in progress. We expect the
datasets to be revised and reissued relatively regularly as we discover errors
in the data or reconsider coding or data representation decisions that we have
made. Consequently, we caution users that the HCJD datasets are provided on an
"as is" basis and we urge users to notify us of errors they discover and to
contact us with their questions and suggestions for improvement.