I would like to use Supreme Court cases that contain First Amendment Free Exercise Clause claims. My research question is what are the most frequent religous themes, phrases, and references within Free Exercise cases that the Court has decided? This was inspired by an article I read recently that used a corpus containing personal writing from 1700-1790 to determine the “orgiinal meaning” of the Establishment Clause at the founding.That text can be found here https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3295239.
I will have to gather the required Supreme Court cases. Though because it is specific topic there are not too many and this will be doable. I hope to use the tools we learn throughout the semester to gather a textual meaning of the phrases used by the Supreme Court when it concerns the free exercise of religion.
A source of inspiration for this is to determine whether the text used represents the diversity of religous practices in the United States that the Supreme Court often mentions. I believe using a textual analysis appraoch will allow me to gain insights into answering my research questions.
code chunk to prevent printing of the R code that generated the plot.