Methodology

How CaseTrail turns a public research dataset into searchable case pages, and what the numbers do and don’t tell you.

Where the data comes from

All case information comes from the Supreme Court Database (SCDB), 2026 Release 01, “Modern” case-centered and justice-centered files organized by citation. That release covers 9,409 decisions from the 1946 Term through the 2025 Term, the latest decided on June 30, 2026. CaseTrail does not add, guess or fill in missing values. When a field is blank in SCDB, it is left off the page.

What each page shows

Case pages show SCDB’s recorded facts: citations, docket number, dates, the vote, how each Justice voted, the disposition, the issue and legal provision, and whether the decision altered precedent or held a law unconstitutional. The “At a glance” paragraph is assembled from those fields by a fixed template. It is not written by a person or by AI, and it does not describe the Court’s reasoning.

Opinion links are built from each citation: CourtListener’s citation lookup (Free Law Project), the Library of Congress’s official U.S. Reports scans (volumes 1–570), and for recent Terms the Supreme Court’s own slip-opinion and docket pages. CaseTrail does not host opinion text.

Statistics

• Unanimous: no dissenting votes (minority votes = 0) among decisions with a recorded vote.
• Decided by one vote: majority votes exceed minority votes by exactly one, such as 5–4 or 4–3.
• Favorable to the petitioner: SCDB’s “winning party” variable shows the petitioner received a favorable disposition.
• Same side (Justice pages): the share of decisions where two Justices were both in the majority or both in dissent, among decisions where both voted. Pairs with fewer than 50 shared decisions are omitted.
• Landmark cases: decisions SCDB codes as formally altering precedent, or as declaring an act of Congress, a state law or a local ordinance unconstitutional.

Decision direction

SCDB codes each decision’s outcome as “liberal” or “conservative” using a published rule set for each issue (for example, in criminal procedure, a pro-defendant outcome is coded liberal). These labels are SCDB’s research classifications, widely used in political science. They are not CaseTrail’s judgment of a decision, and reasonable people disagree about them. CaseTrail shows them on case pages only and does not rank or score Justices by them.

Labels

Category names come from the SCDB online codebook. A few long names are shortened for readability (for example, “Clayton” becomes “Clayton Act”); the underlying codes are unchanged.

What gets indexed by search engines

Every decision has a page. At launch, CaseTrail asks search engines to index the 2,557 orally argued decisions that altered precedent, struck down a law, were decided by one vote, or came from the 2015 Term or later, plus all topic, issue, Justice, Term and era pages with enough decisions to be useful (issue pages: at least 15 decisions). Other case pages are marked noindex but stay reachable from search and lists. Search result pages are never indexed.

Limits

• Coverage starts with the 1946 Term. Earlier decisions are in SCDB’s separate Legacy release and are not loaded yet.
• Only the U.S. Supreme Court is covered. Federal courts of appeals and state courts are not.
• SCDB assigns one primary issue per decision record. Many cases involve several issues.
• SCDB is updated in periodic releases. Decisions announced after the release appear here only after the next release is imported.