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Measuring the Issue Content of Supreme Court Opinions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Douglas Rice
Douglas Rice*
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts Amherst
*
Contact the author at drrice@umass.edu.
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Abstract

The opinions of the US Supreme Court are central to volumes of research on law, courts, and politics. To understand these complex and often-lengthy documents, scholars frequently rely on dichotomous indicators of opinion content. While sometimes appropriate, for many research settings this simplification of opinion content systematically omits important information. Using all US Supreme Court opinions from 1803 to 2010 in association with structural topic models, I instead demonstrate the value of representing the Court’s attention in opinions in terms of topic proportions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , Spring 2019 , pp. 107 - 127
Copyright
© 2019 by the Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Tom Clark, Marie Hojnacki, James Honaker, Burt Monroe, Joseph Smith, and Chris Zorn for their helpful comments and suggestions on prior iterations of this research. Data and supporting materials necessary to reproduce the numerical results in the article are available in the JLC Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YFLR9W.

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