The Federal Courts Project

The ultimate goal of this project is to build a centralized database of the appointed federal judgeships across the 13 district appellate courts during the 107th to 117th congress (2001-2022).

The analysis of the data has been written into the article Senate confirmations of circuit court judges have become more politically divided.

The file data.csv contains the full dataset of all confirmed judges, the circuit they were confirmed to and the senate votes. The file includes following variables:

Header	Definition
name	The name of the appointed judge.
circuit	The circuit the judge was appointed to.
confirmation_date	The date the judge was confirmed by the senate.
nomination_no	Unique number for the senate nomination.
congress_no	The congress that elected the judge. Spans from the 107th to the 117th Congress.
session	The session within which the judge was elected. Has either the nummeric value of 1 or 2 depending on whether the judge was elected during the first or second session of a congress.
democrats	The number of democratic senators in the U.S. Senate at the time of the confirmation.
republicans	The number of republican senators in the U.S. Senate at the time of the confirmation.
independets	The number of independent senators in the U.S. Senate at the time of the confirmation.
record_vote_number	Id for the vote by the congress.
yea_votes	The number of senators that voted 'yea' to the confirmation of the judge. If value is missing, the judge was confirmed by voice vote.
nay_votes	The number of senators that voted 'nay' to the confirmation of the judge. If value is missing, the judge was confirmed by voice vote.
vote_id	Unique numerical id for each confirmation vote.
D_yea	The number of democratic senators that voted 'yea' to the confirmation of the judge.
D_nay	The number of democratic senators that voted 'nay' to the confirmation of the judge.
D_no_vote	The number of democratic senators that did not vote for the confirmation of the judge.
R_yea	The number of republican senators that voted 'yea' to the confirmation of the judge.
R_nay	The number of republican senators that voted 'nay' to the confirmation of the judge.
R_no_vote	The number of republican senators that did not vote for the confirmation of the judge.
I_yea	The number of independent senators that voted 'yea' to the confirmation of the judge.
I_nay	The number of independent senators that voted 'nay' to the confirmation of the judge.
I_no_vote	The number of independent senators that did not vote for the confirmation of the judge.
vote	A list of each senators name and vote

Inside the data directory:

• data.csv: The complete dataset as explained above.
• nominations.csv: This file contains the tabular version of the html scrapes.
• party_votes.csv: The initial dataset of the scrape of the votes of all senators for each nomination.
• voteinfo.csv: Contains all the information needed to loop through customized links to each nomination and scrape the votes of all senators for each nomination.
• votes.csv: File containing all judges, their names, circuit number, confirmation date, congress number, nomination number, confirmation date and number of yea and nay votes from the senate confirmation. It is the cleaned and broken down version of nominations.csv.

Inside the html_scrapes directory:

• 12 html files containing the original scrape of all individuals confirmed by the judiciary committee in the senate from 2001 to 2022. These files are the basis for the list of all confirmed circuit judges and the yea and nay votes in the Senate.

Inside the map directory:

• courts13_join.json: Geojson shapefile of all 13 district appellate courts.
• map.html: HTML code for an interactive map displaying each appellate courts district and the judges confirmed to that district including the partisan votes for each judge. Can be broken down to each congress.
• geo-data.js: The final file combining the data from data.csv converted into js and the geojson shapefiles. The basis for the visualization created in map.html.