With support from the National Science Foundation, Jeffrey Segal, Harold Spaeth, and I have created this digital archive to house documents from the Harry A. Blackmun Papers located in the Library of Congress. In the archive now are preliminary [pool] memoranda and docket sheets from Justices Blackmun's years on the Rehnquist Court (1986-1993 terms). (To learn more about these documents, click on their names.)
We hope to add conference lists, opinion assignment sheets, and circulation lists. We also will plan to make these data available in a form that students of the Court can analyze---as part of the U.S. Supreme Court Database series.
To go directly to the archive, click here.
To learn more about the Court's case-selection process (and view sample documents), click here.
To learn more about the Court's decision making on the merits of cases (and view sample documents), click here.
We realize that the archive works (and looks) better in some browsers than others. We hope to fix the problem over the coming weeks. To send us feedback on this site, please click here.