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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)

Not asking the right questions at the Roberts Hearings?

Wired magazine has had its editorial ups-and-downs but it still manages to provoke a little thought about the intersection of technology and the law. In a recent article columnist Bruce Schneier posits that the Senate should have quizzed Supreme Court nominee John Roberts about some of the concerns that the Court will be facing in the future such as privacy expectations an individual should have in his or her genetic materials and the unprecedented wholesale surveillance of an individual by the government. To read the article (and respond in the Rants & Raves section) go to the complete article "A Sci-Fi Future Awaits the Court."

Transcripts of the Roberts Nomination Hearings

A quick and easy way to get transcripts of the John Roberts confirmation hearings is to visit the University of Michigan Law Library's Hot Topics: Information on John Glover Roberts, Jr. page.

There, in the Confirmation Hearings section you'll find links to the Federal Document Clearing House's verbatim transcripts of the Judiciary committee hearings.

Supreme Court Nominations - Source Documents

The tireless folks at the Library of Congress's Law Library Reading Room have just launched these two collections of source documents on recent Supreme Court Nominations. The documents include floor debates (Senate debate while in Executive Session), votes, hearing transcripts, and Senate statements (statements made about the nominees outside of Executive Session).

• Supreme Court Nominations - Not Confirmed (covering Robert H. Bork, G. Harrold Carswell, Clement F. Haynsworth, and Homer Thornberry)
• Supreme Court Nominations - Confirmed (covering current justices plus Sandra Day O'Connor and the late William H. Rehnquist)

Beware! These documents are all in PDF format and some are quite large.

[Thanks to Emily Carr, Legal Reference Specialist at the Law Library of Congress, for the tip!]

Live Blogging the Roberts Confirmation Hearings

Tom Goldstein (of the firm of Goldstein & Howe, P.C.) is live-blogging the Roberts Confirmation Hearings over at Goldstein & Howe's SCOTUSBlog. As we write, he's covered the first days of hearings in these posts:

• Welcome to the Roberts Confirmation Hearings
• The Roberts Hearings, Day Two
• The Roberts Hearings, Day Three
• The Roberts Hearings, Day Four

SCOTUSBlog is also posting commentaries by its own Lyle Denniston as well as a daily roundup of selected news coverage and commentaries from other sources.

Stay tuned to SCOTUSBlog for more on each day's hearings.

New Supreme Court Nominations Guide from Georgetown

Georgetown's Edward Bennett Williams Law Library has an excellent new guide, U.S. Supreme Court Nominations: In-Depth Research, on the Supreme Court nominations process. The guide includes detailed information on the process itself, on the current nominee, John Roberts, on lobbying groups, and on past confirmation failures.

[Thanks to the folks at slaw for the tip!]

A New John G. Roberts Collection from U. Michigan

The University of Michigan Law Library has created a particularly thorough collection of links to documents by and about Supreme  Court nominee John G. Roberts. The collection, Hot Topics: Information on John Glover Roberts, Jr., Supreme Court Nominee, includes biographical information, papers from Roberts's time in the DOJ and the  White House Records, opinions, briefs, and articles written by Roberts, transcripts of his arguments before the Supreme Court, recent New York Times and Slate articles about Roberts, and general information about the Supreme Court nomination process.

[Thanks to the folks at the University of San Diego Law Library's lrc-orbit for the tip!]

Roberts Documents from the National Archives & Reagan Library

The National Archives has recently released a batch of memoranda written by John Roberts in the early 1980s. These Records Pertaining to John G. Roberts, Jr. are all in PDF format.

And this Monday, the archives of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library released more than 5000 pages of John Roberts documents. The Reagan Library's Roberts documents are sorted by topic and are also in PDF format.

John Roberts Information from the Library of Congress

The Law Library of Congress has brought together a collection of online information, and of citations to books and articles, by and about Judge John G. Roberts.

This collection, Supreme Court Nominations - John G. Roberts: Selected Resources in the Law Library Reading Room, includes cites to articles and books by Judge Roberts; cites (with links) to judicial opinions he’s written while on the D.C. Circuit; cites to cases argued by John Roberts (with Westlaw and Lexis transcript citations and/or links to Oyez audio files); transcripts of Judiciary Committee hearings on his appointment to D.C. Circuit; cites to books about Supreme Court nominations in general; and links to other Supreme Court nomination and Roberts sites on the web.

[Thanks to the folks at the Law Librarian Blog for the tip.]

John Roberts News on Westlaw

Westlaw has created Supreme Court Nominee John G. Roberts - News (the ROBERTS-NEWS database), a separate collection of thousands of stories on Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts from newspapers, magazines, and wire services.

This is a great help when dealing with a nominee with a common name like "John Roberts." If you search in this collection, you don't even need to use Roberts's name as a search term, and you are guaranteed that all of the stories you retrieve will in fact be about Judge Roberts.