justicedao/ipfs_us_courts

Tables (JSONL in data/): courts (330), courthouses (1390), judges (5637), forms (2370), rules (14), state_rules (see ROWCOUNTS.txt). Schema: schema.json. subdivision_iso joins to the coverage matrix (ISO 3166-2).

Licence

• Federal tables (courts, courthouses, judges [FJC], forms, rules [uscourts.gov]): public domain, US Government works (17 U.S.C. §105).
• state_rules: NOT asserted public domain. 1663 rows from 11 states (AL AR GA IA IL IN MA MS NC PA VA) via the ipfs_datasets_py scraper, plus 776 documents from 20 official state court rules sites (source_collection=official_state_court_sites_20261026; record holds file_url + file_sha256; documents not included). Rerun on 2026-10-27 added 274 more documents (NE 22, DE 93, KS 159; source_collection=official_state_court_sites_rerun_20261027), deduped against existing rows. Common Crawl archive recovery on 2026-10-28 added 90 documents (DE 87, MI 3; source_collection=commoncrawl_archive_20261028, archive_source=commoncrawl; record keeps source=archive, original_url, archive_timestamp, archive_index, warc_filename/offset/length, cc_digest, content_sha256, and extracted text), after dropping index/navigation/form pages by an explicit heuristic and deduping by sha256 and URL. Each row has license="see source terms". Court rules may carry state or publisher copyright/terms; check the source_url in each record.

Exclusions

• 11 courts rows with transport=http_unreachable were removed (plain-HTTP hosts the collector couldn't reach).
• Form PDFs are not included; file_url and file_sha256 are given per form.

Provenance

Collected 2026-10-26 (PT): keyless, HTTPS, TLS verified, robots.txt and Crawl-delay honored, no captcha/WAF bypass. courts.content_sha256 is the hash of the source page refetched 2026-10-26 (see content_sha256_note).

State judiciary directories, Phase 1 (added 2026-10-28)

source_collection=official_state_judiciary_sites_phase1_20261028. Added courts 71, courthouses 413, judges 860, forms 2300 from official state judiciary sites (HTTPS only, 1 req/10s, robots treated as advisory for official government hosts per owner ruling with Crawl-delay honored, no captcha/WAF bypass, stop on first 403/429/challenge). Deduped against existing rows by URL (courts.url, forms.file_url) and normalized name+state (courthouses +address; judges name+court+state; forms title+state+file_sha256). Dropped as hub duplicates: 0; dropped as duplicates within Phase 1: courts 177, courthouses 2, forms 23. Each new row has coverage = the state's collection outcome: complete | partial_host_stopped (host returned 403/challenge mid-run) | partial_guard_stop (stopped by memory guard). Judges: only name, title, court, roster URL from official public rosters. 401 judge rows have court_id=null because their roster section (e.g. NE districts/committees, AR "Circuit Judges") did not match a courts row; court_name holds the roster section label. Forms: PDFs not stored; file_url + file_sha256 only.

Coverage by state

• AK: complete (courts 2, courthouses 2, forms 250)
• AL: complete (courts 4, courthouses 4, forms 3)
• AR: complete (courts 1, courthouses 2, judges 123, forms 183)
• AZ: complete (courts 3, courthouses 6, judges 26, forms 36)
• CA: partial_host_stopped (courts 1, courthouses 4, forms 2)
• GA: complete (courts 1, courthouses 1)
• HI: complete (courts 3, courthouses 10, forms 244)
• IL: partial_host_stopped (courts 6, courthouses 222, judges 24, forms 114)
• IN: complete (courts 2, courthouses 2)
• MD: complete (courts 6, courthouses 5, judges 11, forms 243)
• ME: complete (courts 3, courthouses 5, forms 234)
• NE: complete (courts 10, courthouses 1, judges 586, forms 242)
• OH: complete (courts 13, courthouses 17, judges 19, forms 247)
• OR: partial_host_stopped (courts 1, courthouses 1)
• PA: partial_guard_stop (courts 7, courthouses 109, judges 25, forms 165)
• RI: complete (courts 1, courthouses 10, forms 5)
• TX: complete (courts 1, courthouses 6, forms 246)
• UT: complete (courts 5, courthouses 1, judges 46, forms 8)
• WV: partial_guard_stop (courts 1, courthouses 5, forms 78)

Gaps (no rows published)

• DE: phase1 ran; official pages yielded no usable static rows
• MT: no candidate directory/judges/forms page in static landing HTML (site errors)
• CT: blocked in phase0: HTTP 403 (jud.ct.gov)
• VA: blocked in phase0: HTTP 403 (vacourts.gov)
• KS: blocked in phase0: challenge page (challenge-platform)
• WA: host stopped on first request: HTTP 403 (courts.wa.gov)
• WI: host stopped: hCaptcha challenge (wicourts.gov)
• ND: host stopped: HTTP 403 (ndcourts.gov), no rows

Flags

forms_cap250 (forms capped at 250 file links per state; more exist at source):

• AK: forms capped at 250 of 980 file links
• AR: forms capped at 250 of 357 file links
• HI: forms capped at 250 of 760 file links
• MD: forms capped at 250 of 374 file links
• ME: forms capped at 250 of 488 file links
• NE: forms capped at 250 of 283 file links
• OH: forms capped at 250 of 831 file links
• TX: forms capped at 250 of 633 file links transport=http: 0 published rows. Plain-HTTP links were skipped, not fetched (counts per state in status skips: AK 1, AL 1, AR 56, AZ 6, CA 8, GA 16, HI 3, IN 1, MD 1, ME 3, OH 1, PA 3, RI 1, WA 5). Planned: Common Crawl gap-fill for AL, ND, WV, PA (rows will be flagged archive_source=commoncrawl).

Fix-up (staged 2026-10-28, on top of f12c757)

• Alabama state/county rows: coverage changed complete -> partial_guard_stop (the AL collection was cut by the memory guard).
• judges now has a role_type field on every row (judge, justice, magistrate, senior_judge; for unlinked rows also committee_member, other). senior_judge = 7 Utah Board of Senior Judges members, kept, assigned by explicit logged rules.
• Removed 119 unlinked rows (court_id null) whose role_type was committee_member/staff/other: these were committee, association or board memberships (mostly Nebraska Judicial Branch committee pages), not judicial seats. Removed rows are saved for audit (removed_judges.jsonl, not published). 107 of them name a person who still appears in this state as a seat row. Kept unlinked rows with role_type judge/justice/senior_judge (282) remain without a court_id.

State judiciary directories, Phase 2 (added 2026-10-29)

source_collection=official_state_judiciary_sites_phase2_20261028. Added courts 77, courthouses 102, judges 0, forms 936 from official state judiciary sites (collected 2026-10-28 PT; same rules as Phase 1: HTTPS only, TLS verified, 1 req/10s or longer robots Crawl-delay, no captcha/WAF bypass, stop host on first 403/429/challenge). Deduped against existing rows by URL and normalized name+state+address: 0 hub duplicates; 21 duplicate MN courthouse ids removed within Phase 2; 3 IA courthouse variants of the same building (1111 East Court Avenue, Des Moines) merged into one row. Coverage value partial_rows_dropped (new in this release): collection ran, but some parsed rows were dropped in review.

Coverage by state

• ID: complete (courts 12, courthouses 12, forms 247)
• KY: complete (courts 2, courthouses 2, forms 250)
• WY: complete (courts 4, courthouses 5, forms 250)
• NV: partial_host_stopped, HTTP 403 mid-run at nvcourts.gov (courts 4, courthouses 5, forms 132)
• MN: partial_host_stopped, reCAPTCHA challenge at mncourts.gov (courts 55, courthouses 77)
• IA: partial_rows_dropped (courthouses 1, forms 57). All 16 parsed IA judge rows were dropped: the roster parse was unreliable (e.g. sitting justices labeled under an "In Memoriam" page) and no IA courts row existed to link them. No IA judges are published.

Gaps (no rows published)

• CO: host stopped: HTTP 403 (coloradojudicial.gov)
• MS: host stopped: challenge page (challenge-platform, courts.ms.gov)
• ND: host stopped: HTTP 403 (ndcourts.gov)
• NM: official pages yielded no usable static rows
• FL: official pages yielded no usable static rows
• SC: deferred (robots Crawl-delay 120000 s)
• Earlier blocked hosts (Phase 0/1, not retried): CT (403), VA (403), KS (challenge), WA (403), WI (hCaptcha). DE and MT: no usable static rows.

Flags

forms_cap250 (forms capped at 250 file links per state; more exist at source):

• ID: forms capped at 250 of 711 file links (247 published after 404s)
• KY: forms capped at 250 of 1034 file links
• WY: forms capped at 250 of 1031 file links Forms: PDFs not stored; file_url + file_sha256 only. transport=http: 0 published rows (plain-HTTP links skipped). Planned: Common Crawl gap-fill for AL, ND, WV, PA, CO, MS, MN, NM, FL (rows will be flagged archive_source=commoncrawl; not in this release).

state_rules schema note (2026-10-29)

The record column of state_rules is a JSON-encoded string (decode with json.loads). Its source records come from three collections with different nested shapes, and that broke Arrow schema inference. Values are unchanged; only the type encoding changed. source_collection is null for the 1663 scraper rows.