Improving Discoverability of SCOTUS Docket Sheets

A Quick and Painless Way to Access Supreme Court Docket Sheets & US Reports

Earlier this week, a patron asked if amicus briefs had been filed in a number of various Supreme Court cases from the 70s and 80s. While it’s pretty simple to find SCOTUS dockets on their website for post-2001 cases, it was surprisingly difficult to locate these older docket sheets.

ProQuest’s pricey Supreme Court Insight had some of them, but our library only subscribes to the post-1975 module. Our own microfilm was temporarily inaccessible due to ongoing renovations. The most promising lead was the National Archives’ digitized 1791-1995 Engrossed Dockets collection, but their search UI felt clunky and their OCR transcriptions didn’t really mesh well with the search function.

The good news is that (1) National Archives has an API, (2) WUSTL maintains an excellent Supreme Court Database, and (3) it only took a couple evenings to cobble together a search tool that anyone can access here: https://njyoon.github.io/scotus-dockets/.

Sometimes there are sensible, practical reasons for hand-coding websites, and sometimes you notice that ‘SCOTUS,’ ‘docket,’ and ‘sheets’ are all six-letter words that would stack up nicely in a monospace font.

Some things I noticed while working on this project:

• While NARA’s digitized Engrossed Dockets go back to 1791, the docket numbers weren’t reliably and consistently printed on the docket sheets until 1971, so that’s as far back as the tool currently goes. If anyone wants to try their hand at linking the older docket sheets, feel free to submit a pull request here: https://github.com/njyoon/scotus-dockets

• The older docket sheets have a certain charm and make me feel better about my own messy journaling. Here’s the docket sheet for Marbury v. Madison (1803):

I love the little tornado doodles the clerk did here — is this the precursor to the birdcage parentheses caption border? Also, why did we collectively revert to “et. al.” when we were using the much more user-friendly “+ others” back in 1801??

• Fetching the PDF of a U.S. Reports opinion has always felt needlessly convoluted to me, so I included a link to the PDF opinion of every SCOTUS case prior to 2014. Props to the Library of Congress for keeping such well-structured URLs for the PDFs!

• I was inspired by the mensch who put together this fantastic index for the English Reports and its many, many abbreviations on their blog.