Legal Constraint in the U.S. Courts of Appeals

These data show when and how U.S. Court of Appeals judges cite existing published circuit precedents when writing panel opinions. Specifically these data cover the use of all such precedents dating back to 1953 and the citation decisions themselves are examined for cases from 1990 through 2010. Both treatment cases and precedents are limited to search and seizure cases that cite the Fourth Amendment of the United States constitution. In addition to the information on citation and treatment, the relevant databases contain several variables describing features of the treatment case, the precedent, and the relationship between those two. The provided Stata .do file contains the code necessary to produce all the numerical results in the associated article as well as conduct ancillary analyses mentioned in the endnotes.