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.本数据集展示了美国上诉法院法官在撰写合议庭意见书时，援引已公开的巡回法院先例的时机与具体方式。具体而言，本数据集涵盖了可追溯至1953年的所有此类先例的援引情况，并针对1990年至2010年间的案件，对其援引决策展开分析。本数据集所涉及的待审案件与先例均限定于援引《美国宪法第四修正案》的搜查与扣押类案件。除与先例援引及司法处理相关的信息外，关联数据库还涵盖多个变量，用于刻画待审案件、先例自身的特征，以及二者之间的关联关系。本次提供的Stata .do脚本文件包含了复现关联论文中所有数值结果，以及执行尾注中提及的补充分析所需的全部代码。