Finding the state for a caselaw

[amit-lf]

Hi, I want to find out which state a case law belongs to. I was planning to use court_id as a surrogate till I realized that court_ids like ca1 serve multiple states. If it is possible to go more granular like the city or zipcode that will be great. Help is appreciated. Thanks

[mlissner]

This is a tough one. You might be able to get some of this from FJC's integrated DB, but that's only federal cases. We import that data from time to time, but haven't done so for a few years.

[legaltextai]

Although not updated anymore, https://huggingface.co/datasets/harvard-lil/cold-cases has the state information.
@mlissner Mike, you used to have a page dedicated to court labels / names, like 'ind' is Indiana Supreme Court, but I can't find that anymore.
There should be a way to train the model to deduce the state. How did Harvard added the court jurisdiction column?

[mlissner]

Some states are easy, like Indiana Supreme Couirt. Others are impossible like CA9. No idea if/how CAP did/does it.

The page you're looking for is: https://www.courtlistener.com/help/api/jurisdictions/, I think?

[amit-lf]

Thanks Mike, 'legaltextai'.

Thanks for sharing the helpful URL. Agree that in some cases it is easy to infer but thanks for confirming the difficulty in cases like CA9.

[legaltextai]

attached is a court_short_name,court_full_name,court_jurisdiction based on harvard_cold dataset
you can join it into the court CL dataset
i've already noticed some errors or incomplete information, but it is a good starting point if you need to add 'court_jurisdiction' like e.g. "Ohio, OH" and then filter out by states
hope this helps
court_names_jurisdiction.csv

[mlissner]

Hm, it's new, not fully deployed, and only partly populated, but we actually have a courthouse table that's joined to the Court table. I'd welcome a PR to include it as nested and filterable data in our Court API if anybody was interested.

[legaltextai]

i think courts like ca1, ca2 etc would fall under "USA, Federal" jurisdiction, not state jurisdiction