A group of law schools will help expand an online U.S. Supreme Court database so that it reaches back to the court's first recorded decision in 1792.

The schools received an $874,000 National Science Foundation grant in September to begin the four-year project, which will add 19,675 cases to a database that now extends from the Court's 1953 term through 2008, said Lee Epstein, a professor at Northwestern University School of Law. The group will post 4,400 cases by next summer and add more in installments each year, she said.

The other schools involved are the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Washington University Law School, Michigan State University College of Law and the political science departments at Princeton University and Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, N.Y.

"There's a lot of interest in the history of the Court and lots of people write about the Court, and now they're going to have an empirical foundation," Epstein said.

Harold Spaeth, professor emeritus at Michigan State, created the database during the 1980s for scholarly research. The schools redesigned it last year with updated technology to make it more user-friendly for non-academics. The database, accessible here, eventually will begin with the Court's first recorded decision, Georgia v. Brailsford.

Spaeth has already coded cases from 1792 through 1812. The project "will add an historical dimension that will make it far more useful to people," he said.

The site tracks a variety of high court information, including dissents, and lets users analyze statistics in graphs or tables. The site is independent and nonpartisan, Epstein said.

Information from the database has been cited in peer-reviewed research about the workings of the court, Northwestern said in a press release.