Judicial Review of Congress Updated and Expanded

A comprehensive catalog of every case in which the Court considered a constitutional challenge to an act of Congress

I have now posted to my personal website an updated and expanded version of the Judicial Review of Congress Database. You may find here the database itself, a description of the variables, a description of how the cases were identified and selected, and a text list of the cases invalidating a provision of an act of Congress in whole or in part. (A comparable list of cases upholding acts of Congress against constitutional challenge is still in process, though the cases themselves are included in the JRC Database.)

The Judicial Review of Congress Database 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.