Fifty weeks (and just over a hundred posts) ago, we started the California Supreme Court Review, applying statistical and data analytic techniques to studying the decision making of the California Supreme Court. Our analysis was based upon a data library which we created based on dozens of data points drawn from every one of the Court's decisions, both civil and criminal, since 2000. During the past year we've studied everything from the geographical sources of the Court's docket to reversal rates for each District of the Court of Appeal, from the Court's experience with amicus briefs to why affirmances tend to be pending longer before oral argument is scheduled than reversals are.
Today, we begin the next phase of our analysis. Over the past few months, we've been working on expanding our data library, both by adding additional data points for each of the cases which were already included, and by moving the start point of our data earlier to encompass the entire career on the Court of every current Justice. The data now includes every case the Court has decided from January 1, 1994 to today – 1,004 civil and 1,293 criminal. In terms of cases covered, that's an increase of 44%. In terms of total data points across the entire span of cases, our data library has more than doubled, to in excess of two hundred thousand data points.
Join us back here tomorrow as we talk about the new parameters we've added to our data.
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