Every U.S. Supreme Court case ends in a decision, but it starts with arguments, and those arguments come in many forms: the initial petition, a series of briefs, and then usually oral arguments, all of which have been recorded since October 1955 and transcribed since October 1968.
Unfortunately, all those pieces tend to be scattered. Even the Supreme Court's own website directs you to different pages for every one of those pieces. Other essential pieces of information, such as copies of statutes, records from the lower courts, etc, can usually be found in the briefs or elsewhere, but you have to know where to look.
So we've created this "hub" to help connect those pieces. Here's an example: an excerpt from the March 23, 2026 argument in Watson v. RNC (No. 24-1260), with links to documents that activate automatically as the argument progresses.
This website barely scratches the surface of what is possible, but hopefully it will give you sense of what a modern UI can accomplish, and maybe it will even inspire others to "follow suit."
We rely only on "authoritative" sources, starting with The U.S. Supreme Court, as well as the The National Archives and The Oyez Project; however, authoritative does not mean error-free. For example:
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The transcript for Rogers v. Tennessee (No. 99-6218) is dated 11/08/00, but the correct date is November 1, 2000.
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The transcript for Batson v. Kentucky (No. 84-6263) is dated 12/2/1985, but the correct date is December 12, 1985.
Data from The Oyez Project is slightly more problematic, as we've noted, but being able to compare multiple data sources, including The Supreme Court Database, has been a great way of flushing out mistakes, on all sides.
And make no mistake: these are all simple, minor mistakes, so we don't mean to blow them out of proportion, but they do create problems when trying to connect all the pieces for all the cases. We make corrections here as we find them, but without the ability to feed those corrections back to their source, disconnects will persist.
Missing data is also occasionally a problem; for example:
- The transcript for Reno v. Bossier Parish School Bd. (No. 98-405) cannot be downloaded; the URL is listed as
https://www.supremecourt.gov/pdfs/transcripts/1998/98-405_98-406_04-26-1999.pdf
Advocate data is another challenge, because it's not recorded anywhere as a separate set of data. The Court does record advocate names in various places, including transcripts and Journals, but they presumably track that information separately as well, because on rare occasions, the Chief Justice will congratulate an attorney (e.g., Edwin Kneedler) for having just argued their 100th case.
Extracting advocate data from printed/scanned journals and transcripts is non-trivial and error-prone, and disambiguating names (ie, understanding when two similar names are different people, or vice versa) requires time. For cases from the October Term 1955 onward, we rely largely on transcripts, and for certain groups of advocates, we have either done our own research, as we did for Justice Advocates, or we have supplemented the research of others; see Women Advocates.
There is still more work to do in terms of producing a complete and accurate list of Top Advocates. Of course, if the Court shared its advocate data with the public, that would be even better.
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We need a simple way of capturing and then applying speaker corrections. Let's kick this off with an example, where the speaker is Justice Kennedy, not Justice White.
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Add support for
journal_href(in audio entries) andhistory_href(in case entries), to provide more context regarding cases and arguments. -
loc.gov currently has copies of opinions from U.S. Reports as far forward as Volume 578. Unfortunately, they suffer from some sloppiness; for example, there is no entry for Sullivan v. Florida (560 U.S. 181); you can only find it at the bottom of the document for United States v. Comstock (560 U.S. 126). There are numerous other instances where opinions that should exist on loc.gov cannot be found, so at some point, a comprehensive audit should be performed.
Project design (c) 2026 by Jeff Parsons
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