Legal Information Institute: Supreme Court Collection

This site, maintained by the Legal Information Institute at the Cornell University Law School, is a database containing synopses of cases sent to the United States Supreme Court from 1990 to the present. The site is also linked to more than 600 of the Supreme Court's most historically important decisions, from Marbury v. Madison (1803) to Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000). Four "Focused Collections" of cases deal with the Amistad case of 1998 in which movie director Stephen Spielberg was accused of plagiarizing portions of his movie script; 13 of the most important administrative law cases from 1947 to 1984; seven copyright law decisions from 1952 to 1994; and 12 patent law decisions from 1950 to 1995. The database is searchable by the names of the involved parties, the dates on which the case came before the Supreme Court, or the docket number. There is a link to general information about the court, including a Supreme Court case calendar, schedule of oral arguments, a biography and decision list for each current justice, a text of the rules of the Supreme Court, information about the Court's authority and jurisdiction, and a glossary of terms encountered in the Court's written opinions. The site also contains ideas for using the website for teaching, but these ideas, and the site itself, are geared more toward law students, and perhaps undergraduate upper-division legal history classes, than college survey or high school teaching. The site is somewhat difficult to understand and, despite the keyword searchable database, a bit confusing to navigate. Nevertheless, it is a good site for advanced research on Supreme Court cases.