Supporting Comparative Studies of Judicial Behavior: Introducing the Australian High Court Database

Abstract

Comparative research on law and legal institutions depends on high-quality data infrastructure. This article introduces the Australian High Court Database?a new resource that encodes structured information on all full judgments of the High Court of Australia between 1995 and 2020, and all leave applications (Australia?s equivalent to petitions for certiorari) from 2003 to 2018. The database is built in accordance with core principles that support comparative research: it is adaptable, and comparable. By attending to jurisdictional specificity while adhering to general standards, the database supports both within-country analysis and cross-national comparison. We illustrate how the Australian High Court Database can be used to study comparative judicial behavior by analyzing judicial dissent rates across apex courts, judicial ideology, and agenda setting. Show more