About the Judicial Data Project

The Judicial Data Project (JDP) by Mississippi College School of Law is a comprehensive overview of case law in Mississippi. The database provides statistical information on particular cases, as well as links to court documents for those cases.

Case details may be found by searching various terms, such as by requesting the party names, date of appellate review, or type of case. The court documents feature includes links to appellate briefs, oral argument videos, and excerpts from the appellate record.

Currently, the JDP contains the most recent statistical data from the Mississippi Supreme Court and Mississippi Court of Appeals for the years 2008 - 2012. The brief archive for the JDP is current from 2007 - 2012, and the video archive is current from 2004 - 2012. Materials for additional dates are updated weekly. Please be sure to check the data often before citing any statistics, since the program is continually updated.

Video Archive

The video portion of the database is updated at the end of each sitting for the Supreme Court and Court of Appeal. The easiest way to find when the sittings begin and end are at the Courts website under Docket Calendar. The videos are only edited if there are extreme amounts of dead air at the beginning or end of the digital file or to add a slide containg the docket number. This is to ensure fidelity of the archive. Some videos may begin with the argument already in process. If this occurs it is because that is the condition of the video as received by Mississippi College Law. On rare occassion a case may have multiple video files associated with it; in these cases all files will be linked to the case page and should not be confusing to a user.

As of September 2012 the JDP Video Archive contains over 746 video oral arguments.

Brief Archive

The brief archive consist of briefs obtained by Mississippi College Law from the Clerk of the Appellate Courts. They are obtained in an arrangment similar to those of national databases such as Westlaw and LexisNexis. The State of Mississippi still maintains their policies with regards to brief retention and the JDP briefs are "extra" copies when the Court has ruled on a case.

The process for the brief archive begins, generally, with obtaining briefs once a week from the Court after the Tuesday and Thursday handdowns. No briefs are provided until after the opinion has been handed down by the Court. The briefs are then disbound, scanned, filtered with optical recognition software to make searching and indexing easier for patrons, and then published on the JDP website. Hand written briefs are not part of the archive as the software does not recognize the script and makes indexing and use substantially more difficult for such a small number of briefs in the archive. Briefs are maintained as part of the physical archives of the MC Law Library for one year.

As of September 2012 there are over 6,500 briefs in the JDP Brief Archive.

Contact Us

To contact the administrators of the Judicial Data Project you may leave feedback or directly e-mail Stephen Parks at jparks@mc.edu with any questions or issues you have regarding this database.