Supreme Court Nomination Transcripts - Westlaw's Collection

Westlaw's new "Supreme Court Nominee Confirmation Hearings" (SCT-CONFIRM) database gives subscribers a convenient way to pull up transcripts of Supreme Court nomination hearings. Coverage begins with the 1971 hearings on William H. Rehnquist and Lewis F. Powell, Jr., and unofficial transcripts of the John Roberts hearings are already available.

In most instances Westlaw provides the official PDF files from Congress, which means that researchers can't search for words (like "constitutional") within the transcripts. The best they can do is download or print the entire document.

To retrieve the transcripts of the Roberts hearing, enter:

john +2 roberts

To retrieve transcripts of other hearings, follow this pattern:

title(firstname +2 lastname)

For example:

title(anthony +2 kennedy)
title(ruth +2 ginsburg)