nyt-clerk 0.1.5

Python client for parsing SCOTUS data from multiple sources.

Usage

pip install -e [e-mail]:newsdev/nyt-clerk.git#egg=clerk
clerk justices

Data

• clerk cases: SCDB fields about decided merits cases, excluding the justice and vote details.

• clerk votes: SCDB fields about a single justice’s vote in a single case.

• clerk courts: Data about the ideology for each Court term.

• clerk justices: Data about the ideology and qualifications for each Justice before they were confirmed.

• clerk justice_terms: Data about the ideology of each individual Justice during each Court term.

SCDB Data

SCDB data includes cases from 1791 term to the 2014 term. Many fields need to be mapped to their full values. The SCDB maintains an online codebook with these maps.

Ideology / Qualification Scores

Martin-Quinn scores measure the relative ideology of a Justice or a Supreme Court term to the median Justice. Andrew Martin and Kevin Quinn wrote an excellent paper about the method.

Segal-Cover scores measure the ideology and qualification of an individual Justice before their appointment to the Court. Jeffrey Segal wrote a summary and shows the raw data as a table (warning: PDF).