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Mapping Supreme Court decisions

Lauren Kirkwood//Daily Record Legal Affairs Writer//September 15, 2015

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Mapping Supreme Court decisions

Mapping Supreme Court decisions

By Lauren Kirkwood

//Daily Record Legal Affairs Writer

//September 15, 2015

More than two years ago, University of Baltimore School of Law professor Colin Starger began a project aimed at analyzing — and visualizing — the relationships between majority, dissenting and concurring Supreme Court opinions by using software technology to plot the court’s decisions on graphs. Here’s a quick recap of the ongoing “doctrinal cartography” work, based at UB Law.

Now, Starger and the SCOTUS Mapping Project have partnered with the Free Law Project, which provides users with free access to legal research tools and materials, to create an online version of the mapping software.

The project is currently a desktop software tool, but when the web-based version is up and running (possibly by 2016), teachers, librarians and researchers will be able to create their own visualizations of how different SCOTUS cases cite one another.

Adding this online component to the project will allow anyone who is interested to examine the way precedent has influenced certain Supreme Court decisions.

Here’s an example of one of the maps created by Starger:

Colin Starger - map

 

Source: UB Law Library

 

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