Jack Doppelt

Jack Doppelt (IPR-Medill) and Northwestern political science professor Jerry Goldman are merging two popular Web sites to create a forum on the cases and underlying issues pending before the United States Supreme Court.

The redesigned site, Oyez: On the Docket, is scheduled to launch September 1, a month before the start of the Supreme Court's 2000-2001 term. The project ideally will draw together attorneys and parties in the cases, along with legal scholars and students, to engage in moderated discussions about the cases on the court's docket.

The combined site will add the discussion feature to two frequently visited URLs: Goldman's Oyez Project (oyez.nwu.edu) is an introduction to the Supreme Court and a multimedia archive of the institution and its cases. The Medill School of Journalism's On the Docket (www.medill.nwu/docket) features news coverage of current cases. The two sites record more than 10,000 "unique user sessions" a day.

"We are going to have a site that has multiple uses: the archival, multimedia aspect of Oyez, the immediate news aspect of On the Docket, and the citizen involvement that we will bring to the site" Doppelt said. Doppelt and Goldman have not decided if the discussions will focus on individual cases or on issues that consistently arise, such as federalism and first-amendment rights. To create richer discussions, they will look for cases that have both theoretical and real life issues at stake, cases like the grandparents' visitation rights case in Washington state that the Supreme Court will decide this term.

"Much of the discussion may be about policy questions that relate to the court from a personal as well as practical point of view" Doppelt said. "My preference is to have it be much more real than theoretical."

Aside from selecting cases that the site will focus on, Doppelt said the most difficult aspect of starting the project will be to build the virtual community. At first the site will draw upon previous visitors to Oyez and On the Docket, which include students from high schools, community colleges, law schools, and universities. Doppelt hopes eventually to attract political science departments and law reviews as well.

The site would be available 24 hours a day and all discussions would be archived. It is funded by a grant from the Searle Fund.