The Supreme Court, which still hands out quill pens to lawyers who argue before it, does not lend itself easily to computer-assisted reporting. But for two projects, USA TODAY used information technology to help the reporting on two major enterprise projects.
Legal prejudice?
The first was a March 1998 look at the law clerks who assist the justices in screening cases and drafting opinions. In addition to assessing their influence, we undertook the first-ever look at the demographic breakdown of the clerks hired by the current justices, dating back to 1972 in the case of William Rehnquist. While the names of the clerks were publicly available, nothing else about them was, and the court told us "You're on your own" in terms of tracking down this information.
We created a database with all the clerks' names and began, one by one, to figure out their background. Identifying gender was easy in most cases, and a small number of names (Asian and Hispanic) also made ethnic background obvious. But most names were not obvious, and we wanted to be doubly sure that our categorization was correct. Through online searches of legal directories and other sources, we were able to locate most of the clerks. One of the most useful free sites was the Martindale-Hubbell directory of lawyers around the country, at http://lawyers.martindale.com/marhublform
We called many of the clerks and asked them to give us their own ethnic or racial information and to do "peer reporting" on other clerks from their year at the court. We encountered some resistance but were eventually able to feel certain about our information.
To double-check, we sent our information to each justice individually. Only two justices responded. For the other seven, we did not interpret their silence as confirmation of our information, but after further checking we went ahead, and have not heard since that any of our information was wrong.
The survey indicated that the justices have hired extremely low numbers of minorities as law clerks. The stories triggered objections from civil rights groups and a debate over the reasons for and significance of the court's hiring practices. The following is a link to the original stories and follow-up stories on this issue.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/court/clerk/clerk000.htm
Docket declinations
The second project was a December 1998 look at the Supreme Court's docket, with special focus on the cases that the court decides not to decide-the cases the court passes up. Lawyers have complained with increasing frequency that the court, in reducing its caseload, has left many areas of the law in a state of confusion.
The court told us 'You're on your own' in terms of tracking down this information.
To document this, we solicited the help of U.S. Law Week, a BNA publication that lists, in capsule form, every case on the court's docket of paid cases. With their permission, we used their database to break down the cases the court declines to consider. This customized database indicated that the court declines substantially higher percentages of cases in certain categories than others.
Ultimately, we made only limited use of these data for two reasons.
First, the wide variance in numbers of cases in different categories made the "rejection rate" seem exaggerated in some instances.
Secondly, other reporting indicated that there are so many factors that go into the court's decision to decline a given case that relying on the numbers alone would lead to drawing unsound conclusions. The following are links to the main stories in this package.
www.usatoday.com/news/court/nscot933.htm www.usatoday.com/news/court/nscot932.htm
Tony Mauro can be reached by e-mail at tonymauro@aol.com