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1.
Visualizing the First Amendment
Debbie Rabina & Chris Sula
Pratt SILS, ASIST Speakeasy series
April 8, 2013
2.
• “Congress Shall Make No Law Respecting an
Establishment of Religion, or Prohibiting the Free
Exercise Thereof; or Abridging the Freedom of
Speech, or of the Press; or the Right of the People
Peaceably to Assemble, and To Petition the
Government for a Redress of Grievances.”
3.
First Amendment scholarship
• One of the most studied area of constitutional
law
• Legal studies are traditionally based on
detailed qualitative analysis of legislation and
case law
4.
Our project
• Applies empirical methods and visualization
techniques to gain new insights of trends and
patterns regarding 1st Amd. ruling by the
Supreme Court
• Project goals
– Provide a visual history of the First Amendment
– Assess the impact of these events on the
freedoms protected by the First Amendment.
5.
Questions
• Once done, we will be able to answer
question like:
– Which of the 1st Amd. rights were addressed in a
particular case
– How did a particular Justice vote
– What was the ‘test” (justification) for the ruling
6.
Patterns
• With the hope of being able to reveal patterns
such as:
• Do judges vote along party lines
• Do Justices change their views over time
7.
Phases
•
•
•
•
Collecting and analyzing data
conducting analysis
presenting results in a visual graphic interface
publishing research study
8.
Data collection
• Case law from the First Amendment Center
timeline
• Identify variables:
– Right asserted/denied
– Votes by court
– Writer of majority/minority opinions
– Chief Justice/nominating president
– Legal provision
– Number of subsequent citation the case received
9.
Data sources
• First Amendment Center timeline
– 103 cases with narrative descriptions
• Supreme Court Database
– maintained by Washington University, St. Louis
– 8,407 cases coded with nearly 40 variables
– 655 classified as First Amendment cases
• Supreme Court Citation Network Data
– James H. Fowler (UCSD) and Sangick Jeon (Stanford)
– 202,167 citations to/from majority opinions
10.
Data sources coverage
First Amendment Center
Timeline
Supreme Court
Database
Supreme Court Citation Network Data
1754
1800
1900
1946
2000
Editor's Notes
WelcomeThank you ASISTA project very much in it’s infancyWe welcome feedback and comments
Without a doubt a highly studies area of constitutional lawMore like literary studies
empirical legal research as “research that involves the systematic collection of information (“data”) and its analysis according to some generally accepted method” and includes the coding or tagging of units of text that can, but do not necessarily have to be, numeric in nature (Cane and Kritzer 2010, 4)