THE DATA INCUBATOR · 2018 CAPSTONE
SCOTUS v. Public Opinion
Explore Supreme Court decisions and public opinion through the same keywords, across time.
Local Court index. 8,125 indexed Court cases from 1950–2026. Cases without SCDB scores are searchable but excluded from the chart. Incomplete coverage; ambiguous matches and conflicting texts excluded. Public data may extend beyond the Court date range.
Court search: TF-IDF + embeddings. Matches both keywords and meaning. The list shows the top ten candidates; the chart uses matches passing a fixed relevance threshold. Survey search also combines keywords and question meaning.
Search methodology
The top 100 TF-IDF and top 100 semantic candidates are combined. Ranking uses 90% summary-passage similarity and 10% normalized TF-IDF. The chart uses scores of at least 0.3. Survey questions use the same 90/10 ranking blend. They must have semantic similarity of at least 0.30 and 60% of the strongest survey match across all sources; matches without keyword support require at least 0.40. Each source retains up to ten questions within 90% of its best accepted score. Adding sources can affect this filter. A source may have no matches, and synonyms can still be missed. These experimental scores are not probabilities and can include unrelated cases or miss relevant ones.