Datasets for Empirical Legal Research
Below is a list of commonly-used data sets and other resources. For help with study design or a research project, contact the Empirical Research and Data Services department at ylsdata@yale.edu.
Broad archives for political & social research
- ICPSR
- Yale Institution for Social & Policy Studies (open)
- Pew Research (open)
- Registry of Research Repositories
Law
- TRACFed
- Supreme Court Database (open)
- Appeals Court Database (open)
- http://people.cas.sc.edu/songer/ (example of how researchers might host their data on their own sites)
- http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/NACJD/studies/2086 (an example of the same data in an archive)
- Songer Project (open, formerly JuRI)
- U.S. Supreme Court Justices Database (open)
- State Supreme Court Data Project (open)
- Court Statistics Project (open)
- Cross National Time Series Data Archive
- JRSA Infobase of State Activities & Research (open)
Demographic & economic
Government information
- US government agencies (open)
- For example: Bureau of Justice Statistics
Elections
- American National Election Studies (open)
- Dave Leip's Election Atlas
Public opinion
- Roper Center for Public Opinion
- Gallup Analytics (one user at a time, no microdata)
Business
- Bloomberg (terminal in law library, L3)
- Bloomberg Guide - this YUL guide is great but the login info is different -- see the law library's terminal on L3 for login instructions for our terminal.
- Wharton Research Data Service
- YUL Business Databases list
Aggregators and tools
Additional resources
- Alex Jakubow, Director of Empirical Research and Data Services
- YUL Social Science Data Sources Research Guide
- YLS Empirical Legal Research guides
- YUL StatLab