What We Do

The SCALES Data Explorer is a tool that provides you direct access to our enriched data that is ready for you to use. The data explorer currently holds all of our federal data, including data from all 94 U.S. District Courts. Our next project focuses on local-level criminal court data, which will be added to the same data explorer with the same easy-to-use functionality allowing you to produce graphs, charts, and case subsets to download.

To use the SCALES Data Explorer, just follow the link below where you will be prompted to sign in or sign up with a free account using any valid email address. This will allow you to access the data explorer, where all our SCALES data holdings are integrated into an easy-to-use data tool where you can save your work and analysis that you run. If you want to know more about SCALES software or tools, you can check out our full documentation.

SCALES data can help show whether litigants are getting outcomes in court depending on where they are assigned. The graph below shows that the judge you get matters a lot, with some judges more likely than others to deny litigants the ability to proceed in cases where they can’t afford to pay court fees to initiate a case:

The SCALES Data Explorer can answer many types of questions. For example, it can provide insight into: the distribution of federal criminal prosecutions of immigration or firearm trafficking across U.S. courts; how judges in the same jurisdictions make decisions differently; quantifying the burdens of different experiences of court costs and fee waivers for self-represented litigants compared to represented litigants; and analyzing how actors such as corporations recur and reappear across different types of cases. Give it a try!