SCOTUS Sources

Our chief sources for A Visual History of the Supreme Court of the United States are listed below:

Epstein, Lee, Thomas G. Walker, Nancy Staudt, Scott Hendrickson, and Jason Roberts. (2010). “The U.S. Supreme Court Justices Database.” Chicago, IL: Northwestern University School of Law, January 26.
http://epstein.law.northwestern.edu/research/justicesdata.html.

Andrew D. Martin and Kevin M. Quinn. 2002. “Dynamic Ideal Point Estimation via Markov Chain Monte Carlo for the U.S. Supreme Court, 1953-1999.” Political Analysis. 10:134-153. http://mqscores.wustl.edu/measures.php.

The Oyez Project. http://www.oyez.org/.

U.S. Department of Justice. “Solicitors General of the United States.”
http://www.justice.gov/osg/aboutosg/sglist.html.

Hogue, Henry B. CRS Report for Congress, “Supreme Court Nominations Not Confirmed, 1789-2004,” 21 March 2005.
http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/50146.pdf [PDF].

The information we used regarding the presidents (dates of terms, etc.) are widely available. We used workers in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to fact-check our names and dates. We initially approached Mechanical Turk as an experiment in outsourcing fact-checking; the work we received from its workers ran the gamut from useful to wacky. The useful work, though, proved the experiment to be worth it — we received thoughtful comments on everything from design and layout to the presentation of the data itself.

Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/. A note on Wikipedia: We find Wikipedia to be a highly useful source for finding information quickly. However, since it is an open platform (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citing_Wikipedia), we made sure to corroborate any first findings on Wikipedia with other sources.