us-pro-se: 12103 court self-help guides, instructions and forms across 19 states, harvested under robots with the honest UA

README.md

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+---
+license: other
+license_name: mixed-official-government-sources
+language: [en]
+task_categories: [text-retrieval, question-answering]
+size_categories: [10K<n<100K]
+tags: [legal, law, pro-se, self-represented, court-forms, self-help, us-law, access-to-justice, rag]
+pretty_name: US Pro Se — court self-help guides, instructions and forms
+configs:
+- config_name: all
+  data_files: data/*/pro-se.jsonl.gz
+  default: true
+dataset_info:
+  config_name: all
+  features:
+  - name: id
+    dtype: string
+  - name: level
+    dtype: string
+  - name: jurisdiction
+    dtype: string
+  - name: kind
+    dtype: string
+  - name: title
+    dtype: string
+  - name: text
+    dtype: string
+  - name: court
+    dtype: string
+  - name: source_url
+    dtype: string
+  - name: license
+    dtype: string
+  - name: retrieved_at
+    dtype: string
+  - name: extra
+    dtype: string
+---
+
+# US Pro Se — what the courts themselves tell people who have no lawyer
+
+**12,103 documents** from **19 state court systems**: 2,835
+self-help guide pages, 727 instruction documents and
+8,541 forms, 119,978,550 characters of text, each held verbatim with the exact URL it
+came from.
+
+Most people in a US civil case have no lawyer. The material that actually serves them — how to ask
+for a fee waiver, how to serve papers, what a small-claims hearing looks like, which form number to
+file — is published by the courts, scattered across fifty websites, and collected by nobody. This is
+that layer.
+
+## This is not the law
+
+**Forms and instructions are not statutes and not case law.** A court's self-help page explains a
+procedure; it does not create one, and it can be out of date or wrong about your situation. Nothing
+here should be quoted as authority, cited as law, or treated as legal advice. Where you need the law
+itself, use `docketx/us-statutes`, `docketx/court-rules` and `docketx/us-caselaw` — and the `kind`
+column here (`self-help-guide` / `instructions` / `form`) is there so a retrieval system never
+confuses the two.
+
+## What is in it
+
+| state | documents | guides | instructions | forms | crawl | publisher | hosts |
+|---|--:|--:|--:|--:|---|---|---|
+| Washington (`wa`) | 2,845 | 708 | 227 | 1,910 | complete | Washington State Administrative Office of the Courts | `www.courts.wa.gov` |
+| California (`ca`) | 2,637 | 1,041 | 4 | 1,592 | complete | Judicial Council of California (Self-Help Guide to the California Courts) | `courts.ca.gov`, `selfhelp.courts.ca.gov` |
+| Wisconsin (`wi`) | 1,952 | 143 | 7 | 1,802 | complete | Wisconsin Court System (Self-help law center) | `www.wicourts.gov` |
+| Hawaii (`hi`) | 1,042 | 49 | 113 | 880 | complete | Hawaii State Judiciary (Self-Help) | `www.courts.state.hi.us` |
+| Maine (`me`) | 910 | 20 | 15 | 875 | complete | State of Maine Judicial Branch | `www.courts.maine.gov` |
+| Nebraska (`ne`) | 864 | 156 | 7 | 701 | complete | Nebraska Judicial Branch (Nebraska Online Legal Self-Help Center) | `nebraskajudicial.gov` |
+| Virginia (`va`) | 523 | 28 | 0 | 495 | complete | Virginia Judicial System, Office of the Executive Secretary (Court Self-Help) | `selfhelp.vacourts.gov`, `www.vacourts.gov` |
+| Utah (`ut`) | 326 | 254 | 50 | 22 | complete | Utah State Courts (Self-Help) | `www.utcourts.gov` |
+| South Dakota (`sd`) | 298 | 81 | 58 | 159 | complete | South Dakota Unified Judicial System (Self Help) | `ujs.sd.gov` |
+| Iowa (`ia`) | 232 | 36 | 194 | 2 | still crawling (338 URLs queued) | Iowa Judicial Branch | `www.iowacourts.gov` |
+| Illinois (`il`) | 192 | 101 | 20 | 71 | complete | Office of the Illinois Courts (Illinois Supreme Court) | `www.illinoiscourts.gov` |
+| Delaware (`de`) | 174 | 170 | 4 | 0 | complete | Delaware Judiciary (Delaware Courts Self-Help Center) | `courts.delaware.gov` |
+| Oregon (`or`) | 51 | 26 | 1 | 24 | complete | Oregon Judicial Department (Self-Help Center) | `www.courts.oregon.gov` |
+| Rhode Island (`ri`) | 20 | 2 | 11 | 7 | complete | Rhode Island Judiciary (Self-Help Center) | `www.courts.ri.gov` |
+| Kentucky (`ky`) | 17 | 5 | 12 | 0 | complete | Kentucky Court of Justice (Self-Help Portal) | `www.kycourts.gov` |
+| Alabama (`al`) | 6 | 4 | 2 | 0 | complete | Alabama Supreme Court and State Law Library | `judicial.alabama.gov` |
+| Maryland (`md`) | 6 | 5 | 1 | 0 | complete | Maryland Judiciary (Maryland Court Help Center) | `www.mdcourts.gov` |
+| Idaho (`id`) | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | complete | Idaho Supreme Court (Self-Help) | `api.isc.idaho.gov`, `isc.idaho.gov` |
+| Indiana (`in`) | 4 | 3 | 1 | 0 | complete | Indiana Judicial Branch (Self-Service Legal Center) | `www.in.gov` |
+
+Every count is measured from the `.jsonl.gz` file in `data/` on 2026-09-11 — not estimated, and not
+taken from any index page's own total. "still crawling" means the harvester's own queue is not yet
+empty for that state, so its count will grow; every other state's crawl ran until it had nothing
+left to fetch.
+
+### Fields
+
+| column | meaning |
+|---|---|
+| `id` | stable record id (state, kind, URL path, URL hash) |
+| `level` | always `state` |
+| `jurisdiction` | two-letter state code |
+| `kind` | `self-help-guide` (a court self-help web page), `instructions` (an official guide/handbook document), or `form` (a court form) |
+| `title` | the document's own title, verbatim |
+| `text` | the full text, verbatim — `pdftotext -layout` where the official document is a PDF |
+| `court` | the publishing court or agency |
+| `source_url` | the exact URL fetched |
+| `retrieved_at` | ISO-8601 UTC |
+| `license` | what the source asserts, plus any reservation that travels with the record |
+| `extra` | JSON string — `format`, `text_chars`, and for PDFs `pdf_bytes` and the extraction method |
+
+## How it was collected, and what we refused to take
+
+The first request to every host was `https://<host>/robots.txt`, sent as
+`DocketRouterBot/1.0 (+https://docketrouter.ai/bot)`. That file is stored verbatim next to the
+harvest and its rules are enforced in code:
+
+- a `Disallow` matching a path we wanted means that path was **not fetched**;
+- a `robots.txt` we could not read — WAF 403, HTTP 401 — means the **whole host was skipped**,
+  because unverifiable is not permission;
+- `Crawl-delay` was honoured, with a 1 request/second floor regardless;
+- we never changed user-agent to get around a block.
+
+Per-state consequences of that policy:
+
+- **Alabama (`al`)** — Alabama's official self-help layer is genuinely this thin: the State Law Library publishes the small-claims guide and the appellate snapshot, and nothing else.
+- **Iowa (`ia`)** — **`ai-train=no`** — see the reservations section. Iowa also declares `Crawl-delay: 30`, which we honour, so this state fills in slowly: its crawl is still running.
+- **Idaho (`id`)** — Idaho Supreme Court tier only. The Court Assistance Office forms library (`courtselfhelp.idaho.gov`) sits behind a WAF that 403s its own `robots.txt`, so it is unverifiable and was not crawled.
+- **Illinois (`il`)** — Form PDFs are served from `ilcourtsaudio.blob.core.windows.net`, whose `robots.txt` returned **HTTP 401** — unreadable, so that host was not crawled. HTML pages only.
+- **Maryland (`md`)** — `mdcourts.gov/robots.txt` carries `Disallow: /courtforms` — the Maryland forms library is **excluded by robots** and is not here.
+
+## Reservations that travel with the data
+
+- **Iowa** — `iowacourts.gov/robots.txt` carries, verbatim,
+  `Content-Signal: search=yes,ai-train=no,use=reference`. That is a separate grant from `Disallow`,
+  and we honour it: the Iowa records are for **retrieval and reference only and must not be used as
+  training data**. The reservation is stamped into every Iowa record's `license` field.
+- **Texas is absent because its host stopped answering.** `texaslawhelp.org/robots.txt` had been
+  readable (HTTP 200) when the source was verified on 2026-09-10, but on the harvest run it returned
+  **HTTP 202 with an empty body** — a bot-management interstitial, not a robots file. Unreadable
+  means unverifiable, so the crawl aborted before its first content request and Texas is not in this
+  dataset. (Separately, when that host was readable its terms reserved commercial use:
+  *"Free. Not for sale ... you agree not to sell or make a profit in any way from any information or
+  forms that you obtained through this website."*)
+- **Alaska is deliberately absent.** Its source is verified and harvestable, but the Alaska Court
+  System asserts copyright over its self-help publications — the Small Claims Handbook cover reads
+  *"reproduction of any part of this handbook for commercial purposes without the express written
+  permission of the Alaska Court System is strictly prohibited."* Rather than redistribute it, we
+  hold Alaska pending a licensing decision. It is withheld, not missing.
+- Everything else is an official US state judiciary publication. State government works are not
+  automatically public domain the way federal works are, so we do not claim a licence the source
+  does not grant: each record's `license` field says exactly what the source asserted, which for
+  most of these is nothing at all.
+
+## A state that is not in the table is UNVERIFIED, not withheld
+
+That is the standing rule for every DocketX dataset. A missing state means we have not yet proved
+its source live — official host, `robots.txt` read for our honest bot, and one real passage
+extracted — not that the state refused. Twelve jurisdictions (`ct dc fl ks ma mn nc nd nj ny ok sc`)
+were checked on 2026-09-10 and are blocked today, mostly by WAFs that refuse our `robots.txt`
+request; they stay out until that changes. The rest are simply not done yet.
+
+## Companion datasets
+
+`docketx/us-caselaw` · `docketx/us-statutes` · `docketx/court-rules` · `docketx/us-judges`

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