INSIDE THE US SUPREME-COURT - THE RELIABILITY OF THE JUSTICES CONFERENCE RECORDS

Judicial scholars are making increased use of data from the justices' personal papers. In the face of comments by justices questioning the r eliability of this information and, perhaps, skepticism among judicial scholars about the reliability of some justices' records, it is impor tant to explore the reliability of data drawn from their papers. To do so, we examine the conference records for the 1967 and 1968 terms of the Supreme Court. For these years, the papers of four justices, Earl Warren, William Douglas, William Brennan, and Thurgood Marshall, are a vailable at the Library of Congress. We found that their records are s ubstantially accurate and reliable. A legit model of conference record ing error finds that mistakes are nor simply random noise, but can be explained as a function of case complexity, the length of joint servic e with the voting justices, tentative conference positions, and Court consensus.