Creating the Federal Judicial Database and Research Agenda

Federal district court and circuit court judges serve as the face of law and justice for many citizens in the United States. Because of their importance, there is interest among scholars, students, the media, the public, and policymakers to understand who these judges are and what decisions they make as judges. In aid of improving societal understanding and perceptions of the federal judiciary, this project will develop, make public, and use the Federal Judicial Database. When complete, these data will include detailed background information on all federal district and circuit judges serving from 1789 to the present selected to their positions through presidential nomination and Senate confirmation. The data will be presented to the public through an interactive website designed to facilitate broad user accessibility. The Federal Judicial Database will provide detailed biographical, attribute, and background data on the thousands of federal district and circuit judges selected into their positions under Article III of the U.S. Constitution. Compiled from federal judges’ nomination documentation presented to the Senate, along with other congressional, judicial, and biographical sources and updates of prior data collection efforts, the Federal Judicial Database will include extensive data on each federal judge, including information on nomination, confirmation, departure, demographics, biography, prior judicial and legal employment, and pre-appointment writings and speeches. The Investigator will design, develop, and produce a public website for the consumption and distribution of the Federal Judicial Database. The website design will accommodate information about the research project and data (project background, codebooks, data sources, citations, and publications), interactive search and display abilities, and access to pre-prepared datasets for download. The public web interface will be designed to make the data attractive and accessible to a broad set of non-scholar users and will highlight both individual judge profiles and cross-judge profiles based on interactive searches conducted by the user. Using the newly collected Federal Judicial Database, the Investigator will undertake two research applications. The first of these is an examination of whether district court judges with different legal backgrounds manage civil cases in distinct ways (such as in holding settlement conferences) and whether they vary in their successful encouragement of case settlements. Relevant judge factors from the Federal Judicial Database will include, for example, a district judge’s prior experience as a civil litigator, arbitrator, or mediator and the number of cases she took to trial during her legal career. The second research project using the Federal Judicial Database will be a study of how much variation exists in federal courts of appeals judge professional backgrounds (for example, prior service as prosecutors, public defenders, and corporate lawyers) across time and whether these different judicial backgrounds affect decision making on the federal bench. Beyond these two research projects, the Federal Judicial Database will permit rigorous inquiry into the patterns and effects of judges’ writing, trial experience, education and training, group membership, and more. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.