U.S. Appeals and Supreme Court dataset for: Judicial hierarchy and discursive influence

This dataset contains written opinions from the 11 numbered Courts of Appeals and the DC Circuit Court of Appeals (not including the Federal Circuit), as well as the SCOTUS. It also contains metadata pertaining to each opinion, such as author, year, etc.

It also contains the processed outputs of the rDIM model (Gerow et. al. 2018) pertaining to the experiments performed in our paper. These results contain the assigned influence and topic distribution for each case.

Methods
The data was curated from four main sources:

Harvard Caselaw Access Project case.law
Federal Judicial Center (FJC) list of judges
A list of federal appeals court cases selected for review, as well as their corresponding SCOTUS opinions from Livermore et. al. "The Supreme Court and the Judicial Genre"
The Supreme Court Database (SCDB)

The opinions were cleaned using standard text cleaning techniques. The authors were deduced by performing regular expression matches between the noisy Caselaw author field and a list of judges from the FJC.