What’s Important to the Supreme Court

Partner: Tejas Narechania, Berkeley Law, Academic

Overview

Project Description

The Supreme Court of the United States has essentially unconstrained discretion to set its own docket. In order to earn review, four (out of nine) Justices simply have to decide that a case is sufficiently “important.” But what makes a case important enough to merit the Supreme Court’s attention? This project analyzes the corpus of the Supreme Court’s decisions, and, more specifically, its descriptions of its decision to grant review, in order to discern what counts as “important” when it comes to Supreme Court review.

Expected Deliverable

A final data analysis (and visualization) that is close to publication-ready of our corpus.

What would a successful semester look like to you?

Completed Data Analysis + Data Visualization

Data

Models

Conclusion