The Judicial Review of Congress dataset catalogs all the cases in which the U.S. Supreme Court has substantively reviewed the constitutionality of a provision or application of a federal law. The dataset aims to be the most comprehensive accounting of Supreme Court cases both upholding and invalidating provisions of federal statutes. It does not include cases decided in the lower courts that address the constitutional validity of federal statutory provisions, except to the extent that those cases eventually found their way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The database currently includes 1323 cases decided by the Court from its founding through its October 2021 term and related pieces of information about those cases.
The details of the process of identifying cases to include in the dataset can be found in the appendix to Keith E. Whittington, Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from the Founding to the Present (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019). More information about that book can be found here.
The description of the variables included in the dataset can be found here. judicial_review_of_congress_dataset_description_of_variables.pdf
A description of how the cases to be included in the dataset were identified can be found here. JRC Dataset Case Selection
A text list of the cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court invalidating a federal statutory provision can be found here. list_of_cases_invalidating_a_federal_statutory_provision.pdf
A text list of the cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court upholding a federal statutory provision can be found here.
A MS Excel file of the dataset can be found here. judicial_review_of_congress_database_1789-2022.xlsx
The preferred citation for the use of the dataset is Keith E. Whittington, The Judicial Review of Congress Database, 1789-2022 (July 2022) (available at https://scholar.princeton.edu/kewhitt/judicial-review-congress-database)