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.

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 make decisions differently within the same jurisdictions; the burdens of court costs and fee waivers for self-represented litigants compared to litigants with counsel; and the ways that actors such as corporations recur and reappear across different types of cases.

To use the SCALES Data Explorer, follow the link below to sign in or create a free account. Alternatively, if you prefer to work directly with the underlying data, you can download data files from our file server below, which uses the same sign-in system as the Data Explorer.

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:

If you want to learn more about SCALES software and tools, you can visit our documentation site. To learn about the shape of our dataset, you can take a look at the interactive ontology visualization below, which displays the graph-data structure we developed for our Integrated Justice Platform project.