Jerry Goldman
Professor Emeritus
Interests
Program Area(s): American Politics
Regional Specialization(s): United States
Subfield Specialties: American Political Development; Comparative Historical Analysis; Law and Politics
Professor Goldman developed the OYEZ Project, a multimedia relational database devoted to the United States Supreme Court. With major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and Google, Goldman worked with collaborators in linguistics, psychology, computer science, and political science to create a complete archive of the Court’s public sessions stretching back to October 1955. This amounts to a free searchable database of more than 12,000 hours of audio, 100+ million words, with all speakers identified. The Project is now located at Cornell Law School. The OYEZ website receives more than 14 million visits annually.
With recent advances in artificial intelligence, Goldman led a team of researchers and technical experts to recreate the oral arguments and the opinion announcement for Brown v. Board of Education. These five cases from Kansas, Virginia, South Carolina, Delaware, and the District of Columbia were argued in 1952 and 1953, before the implementation of a recording system; Chief Justice Earl Warren read the entire opinion from the bench on May 17, 1954.
Armed with speaker-identified transcripts for the 18 hours of proceedings and period-appropriate voice samples of the main participants, the team created Brown Revisited, and released it to the public on May 17, 2024, the 70th anniversary of this most famous decision. Designed with mobile phone users in mind, the project is the recipient of the 2025 American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award for enhancing understanding of the law and the legal system.