Dataset, metadata and card from legal-empirics

.gitattributes

@@ -58,3 +58,4 @@ saved_model/**/* filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text
 # Video files - compressed
 *.mp4 filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text
 *.webm filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text
+disputed-terms-national.csv filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text

README.md

@@ -0,0 +1,90 @@
+---
+license: cc-by-4.0
+language:
+- en
+pretty_name: Disputed Contract and Instrument Terms in US State Appellate Courts
+size_categories:
+- 100K<n<1M
+tags:
+- legal
+- law
+- empirical-legal-studies
+- contract-interpretation
+- ambiguity
+- corpus-linguistics
+- legal-drafting
+- empirical-legal-studies
+- state-courts
+configs:
+- config_name: default
+  data_files:
+  - split: train
+    path: disputed-terms-national.csv
+---
+
+# Disputed Contract and Instrument Terms in US State Appellate Courts
+
+One row per (term, decision) pair: a word or phrase a court quoted as the disputed language in a decision containing an ambiguity holding, across the state appellate courts of all 50 states and DC. Terms are extracted from the whole opinion by cue-anchored quotation ('the term "X"', '"X" as used in'), classified into functional drafting categories, and linked to the holding by three graded levels of evidence.
+
+**286,846 rows.** Licence CC BY 4.0. Not legal advice.
+
+## Where this comes from
+
+| | |
+|---|---|
+| Canonical record | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22247377 |
+| Code and methodology | https://github.com/stepuplaw/legal-empirics |
+| Research page | https://stepuplaw.com/research/ |
+| Author | Kevin D. Klagge, [ORCID 0009-0002-1385-8498](https://orcid.org/0009-0002-1385-8498) |
+| Source corpus | CourtListener bulk export, snapshot 2026-06-30 |
+
+The DOI above identifies the **code**, which is a different object from this
+dataset. Cite the code when you are describing the method and cite this dataset
+when you are using the numbers.
+
+## Columns
+
+| Column | Type | Meaning |
+|---|---|---|
+| `term` | string | the disputed language, lowercased and normalised, as the court quoted it |
+| `category` | string | functional drafting class: nexus, degree, temporal, scope, modal, role, succession, property, event, conduct, condition, mental, uncategorised |
+| `source` | string | the instrument the words sit in: testamentary, deed, insurance, contract, statute, constitution, uncertain |
+| `posture` | string | found | rejected | alleged | uncertain -- whether the court held the language ambiguous |
+| `link` | string | direct | proximate | inferred -- strength of the link between this term and the holding; inferred rows must not be pooled with the other two |
+| `oid` | integer | CourtListener opinion id |
+| `cid` | integer | CourtListener cluster id |
+| `court` | string | CourtListener court id |
+| `state` | string | two-letter state postal code |
+| `year` | integer | year the decision was filed |
+| `statement` | string | the row written as one self-contained English sentence, so it can be retrieved, quoted and checked on its own |
+
+Every row carries a `statement` column, which is the row written as one
+self-contained English sentence. A row of codes can be downloaded but not
+retrieved or quoted, and the sentence is what makes each row usable on its own.
+
+## How it was built
+
+Retrieval and extraction are deterministic code over a local corpus of 10.8M US
+judicial opinions. Classification uses rules written against a hand-coded sample
+that ship with their measured accuracy, so the error rate is reported rather
+than assumed. Every study states its exclusion funnel with counts, because
+silent filtering is the commonest defect in research on opinions and it is
+invisible in the result.
+
+`datapackage.json` carries the Frictionless schema, `croissant.json` the
+MLCommons Croissant description, and `dataset.jsonld` the schema.org form.
+
+## Limits
+
+**This is exploratory.** The coded samples behind it were coded once, so it
+supports a described pattern rather than a measurement. Inter-annotator
+reliability has not been established.
+
+**Published appellate opinions are not disputes.** Most disputes settle, most
+settlements are unpublished, and appellate coverage varies by court and decade.
+Any rate here is a rate among decisions that reached an appellate court and were
+published, which is not the same population a drafter cares about.
+
+**Read the study's own limitations section** in the repository before quoting a
+number. Each one names the specific threats to its own validity, including the
+ones that are unflattering.

croissant.json

@@ -0,0 +1,239 @@
+{
+  "@context": {
+    "@language": "en",
+    "@vocab": "https://schema.org/",
+    "cr": "http://mlcommons.org/croissant/",
+    "sc": "https://schema.org/",
+    "dct": "http://purl.org/dc/terms/",
+    "data": {
+      "@id": "cr:data",
+      "@type": "@json"
+    },
+    "dataType": {
+      "@id": "cr:dataType",
+      "@type": "@vocab"
+    },
+    "extract": "cr:extract",
+    "field": "cr:field",
+    "fileObject": "cr:fileObject",
+    "fileProperty": "cr:fileProperty",
+    "column": "cr:column",
+    "recordSet": "cr:recordSet",
+    "source": "cr:source",
+    "subField": "cr:subField",
+    "references": "cr:references",
+    "repeated": "cr:repeated",
+    "examples": {
+      "@id": "cr:examples",
+      "@type": "@json"
+    },
+    "conformsTo": "dct:conformsTo"
+  },
+  "@type": "sc:Dataset",
+  "conformsTo": "http://mlcommons.org/croissant/1.0",
+  "citeAs": "Klagge, Kevin D. legal-empirics. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22247377",
+  "name": "disputed_terms_national",
+  "description": "One row per (term, decision) pair: a word or phrase a court quoted as the disputed language in a decision containing an ambiguity holding, across the state appellate courts of all 50 states and DC. Terms are extracted from the whole opinion by cue-anchored quotation ('the term \"X\"', '\"X\" as used in'), classified into functional drafting categories, and linked to the holding by three graded levels of evidence.",
+  "url": "https://stepuplaw.com/research/disputed-terms-national/",
+  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
+  "version": "2026-09-02",
+  "keywords": [
+    "contract interpretation",
+    "ambiguity",
+    "corpus linguistics",
+    "legal drafting",
+    "empirical legal studies",
+    "state courts"
+  ],
+  "creator": {
+    "@type": "sc:Person",
+    "name": "Kevin D. Klagge",
+    "sameAs": "https://orcid.org/0009-0002-1385-8498"
+  },
+  "distribution": [
+    {
+      "@type": "cr:FileObject",
+      "@id": "disputed-terms-national.csv",
+      "name": "disputed-terms-national.csv",
+      "description": "The dataset as a single UTF-8 CSV with a header row.",
+      "contentUrl": "https://stepuplaw.com/research/disputed-terms-national/disputed-terms-national.csv",
+      "encodingFormat": "text/csv",
+      "sha256": "41794102c0d5c052b40fda0c7779415be95d43a61d08bbbe5462fb66269b11bd"
+    }
+  ],
+  "recordSet": [
+    {
+      "@type": "cr:RecordSet",
+      "@id": "rows",
+      "name": "rows",
+      "description": "Disputed Contract and Instrument Terms in US State Appellate Courts",
+      "field": [
+        {
+          "@type": "cr:Field",
+          "@id": "rows/term",
+          "name": "term",
+          "description": "the disputed language, lowercased and normalised, as the court quoted it",
+          "dataType": "sc:Text",
+          "source": {
+            "fileObject": {
+              "@id": "disputed-terms-national.csv"
+            },
+            "extract": {
+              "column": "term"
+            }
+          }
+        },
+        {
+          "@type": "cr:Field",
+          "@id": "rows/category",
+          "name": "category",
+          "description": "functional drafting class: nexus, degree, temporal, scope, modal, role, succession, property, event, conduct, condition, mental, uncategorised",
+          "dataType": "sc:Text",
+          "source": {
+            "fileObject": {
+              "@id": "disputed-terms-national.csv"
+            },
+            "extract": {
+              "column": "category"
+            }
+          }
+        },
+        {
+          "@type": "cr:Field",
+          "@id": "rows/source",
+          "name": "source",
+          "description": "the instrument the words sit in: testamentary, deed, insurance, contract, statute, constitution, uncertain",
+          "dataType": "sc:Text",
+          "source": {
+            "fileObject": {
+              "@id": "disputed-terms-national.csv"
+            },
+            "extract": {
+              "column": "source"
+            }
+          }
+        },
+        {
+          "@type": "cr:Field",
+          "@id": "rows/posture",
+          "name": "posture",
+          "description": "found | rejected | alleged | uncertain -- whether the court held the language ambiguous",
+          "dataType": "sc:Text",
+          "source": {
+            "fileObject": {
+              "@id": "disputed-terms-national.csv"
+            },
+            "extract": {
+              "column": "posture"
+            }
+          }
+        },
+        {
+          "@type": "cr:Field",
+          "@id": "rows/link",
+          "name": "link",
+          "description": "direct | proximate | inferred -- strength of the link between this term and the holding; inferred rows must not be pooled with the other two",
+          "dataType": "sc:Text",
+          "source": {
+            "fileObject": {
+              "@id": "disputed-terms-national.csv"
+            },
+            "extract": {
+              "column": "link"
+            }
+          }
+        },
+        {
+          "@type": "cr:Field",
+          "@id": "rows/oid",
+          "name": "oid",
+          "description": "CourtListener opinion id",
+          "dataType": "sc:Integer",
+          "source": {
+            "fileObject": {
+              "@id": "disputed-terms-national.csv"
+            },
+            "extract": {
+              "column": "oid"
+            }
+          }
+        },
+        {
+          "@type": "cr:Field",
+          "@id": "rows/cid",
+          "name": "cid",
+          "description": "CourtListener cluster id",
+          "dataType": "sc:Integer",
+          "source": {
+            "fileObject": {
+              "@id": "disputed-terms-national.csv"
+            },
+            "extract": {
+              "column": "cid"
+            }
+          }
+        },
+        {
+          "@type": "cr:Field",
+          "@id": "rows/court",
+          "name": "court",
+          "description": "CourtListener court id",
+          "dataType": "sc:Text",
+          "source": {
+            "fileObject": {
+              "@id": "disputed-terms-national.csv"
+            },
+            "extract": {
+              "column": "court"
+            }
+          }
+        },
+        {
+          "@type": "cr:Field",
+          "@id": "rows/state",
+          "name": "state",
+          "description": "two-letter state postal code",
+          "dataType": "sc:Text",
+          "source": {
+            "fileObject": {
+              "@id": "disputed-terms-national.csv"
+            },
+            "extract": {
+              "column": "state"
+            }
+          }
+        },
+        {
+          "@type": "cr:Field",
+          "@id": "rows/year",
+          "name": "year",
+          "description": "year the decision was filed",
+          "dataType": "sc:Integer",
+          "source": {
+            "fileObject": {
+              "@id": "disputed-terms-national.csv"
+            },
+            "extract": {
+              "column": "year"
+            }
+          }
+        },
+        {
+          "@type": "cr:Field",
+          "@id": "rows/statement",
+          "name": "statement",
+          "description": "the row written as one self-contained English sentence, so it can be retrieved, quoted and checked on its own",
+          "dataType": "sc:Text",
+          "source": {
+            "fileObject": {
+              "@id": "disputed-terms-national.csv"
+            },
+            "extract": {
+              "column": "statement"
+            }
+          }
+        }
+      ]
+    }
+  ]
+}

datapackage.json

@@ -0,0 +1,110 @@
+{
+  "name": "disputed-terms-national",
+  "title": "Disputed Contract and Instrument Terms in US State Appellate Courts",
+  "description": "One row per (term, decision) pair: a word or phrase a court quoted as the disputed language in a decision containing an ambiguity holding, across the state appellate courts of all 50 states and DC. Terms are extracted from the whole opinion by cue-anchored quotation ('the term \"X\"', '\"X\" as used in'), classified into functional drafting categories, and linked to the holding by three graded levels of evidence.",
+  "licenses": [
+    {
+      "name": "CC BY 4.0",
+      "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
+    }
+  ],
+  "homepage": "https://stepuplaw.com/research/disputed-terms-national/",
+  "version": "2026-09-02",
+  "created": "2026-09-02",
+  "sources": [
+    {
+      "title": "CourtListener bulk export, topped up nightly from the courts",
+      "path": "https://www.courtlistener.com/help/api/bulk-data/"
+    }
+  ],
+  "resources": [
+    {
+      "name": "disputed-terms-national",
+      "path": "disputed-terms-national.csv",
+      "format": "csv",
+      "mediatype": "text/csv",
+      "encoding": "utf-8",
+      "bytes": 80549261,
+      "rows": 286846,
+      "hash": "sha256:41794102c0d5c052b40fda0c7779415be95d43a61d08bbbe5462fb66269b11bd",
+      "schema": {
+        "fields": [
+          {
+            "name": "term",
+            "type": "string",
+            "description": "the disputed language, lowercased and normalised, as the court quoted it"
+          },
+          {
+            "name": "category",
+            "type": "string",
+            "description": "functional drafting class: nexus, degree, temporal, scope, modal, role, succession, property, event, conduct, condition, mental, uncategorised"
+          },
+          {
+            "name": "source",
+            "type": "string",
+            "description": "the instrument the words sit in: testamentary, deed, insurance, contract, statute, constitution, uncertain"
+          },
+          {
+            "name": "posture",
+            "type": "string",
+            "description": "found | rejected | alleged | uncertain -- whether the court held the language ambiguous"
+          },
+          {
+            "name": "link",
+            "type": "string",
+            "description": "direct | proximate | inferred -- strength of the link between this term and the holding; inferred rows must not be pooled with the other two"
+          },
+          {
+            "name": "oid",
+            "type": "integer",
+            "description": "CourtListener opinion id"
+          },
+          {
+            "name": "cid",
+            "type": "integer",
+            "description": "CourtListener cluster id"
+          },
+          {
+            "name": "court",
+            "type": "string",
+            "description": "CourtListener court id"
+          },
+          {
+            "name": "state",
+            "type": "string",
+            "description": "two-letter state postal code"
+          },
+          {
+            "name": "year",
+            "type": "integer",
+            "description": "year the decision was filed"
+          },
+          {
+            "name": "statement",
+            "type": "string",
+            "description": "the row written as one self-contained English sentence, so it can be retrieved, quoted and checked on its own"
+          }
+        ]
+      }
+    }
+  ],
+  "provenance": {
+    "repository": "https://github.com/stepuplaw/legal-empirics",
+    "commit": "a8774f7d8d99fd5c49e459ba6e55e12dee7971f1",
+    "run": {
+      "query": "(ambiguous OR ambiguity OR ambiguities)",
+      "scope": "national state appellate (S+SA)",
+      "corpus": "CourtListener bulk snapshot 2026-06-30",
+      "workers": 8,
+      "runtime_minutes": 119.7,
+      "funnel": {
+        "decisions_queued": 236561,
+        "noterm": 118750,
+        "ok": 117804,
+        "noamb": 7
+      },
+      "term_hits": 286846,
+      "distinct_terms": 100679
+    }
+  }
+}

dataset-metadata.json

@@ -0,0 +1,84 @@
+{
+  "title": "Disputed Contract Terms, 51 US Jurisdictions",
+  "subtitle": "Words courts were asked to call ambiguous, and whether the challenge won",
+  "id": "stepuplaw/disputed-terms-national",
+  "licenses": [
+    {
+      "name": "CC-BY-4.0"
+    }
+  ],
+  "keywords": [
+    "contract interpretation",
+    "ambiguity",
+    "corpus linguistics",
+    "legal drafting",
+    "empirical legal studies",
+    "state courts"
+  ],
+  "description": "One row per (term, decision) pair: a word or phrase a court quoted as the disputed language in a decision containing an ambiguity holding, across the state appellate courts of all 50 states and DC. Terms are extracted from the whole opinion by cue-anchored quotation ('the term \"X\"', '\"X\" as used in'), classified into functional drafting categories, and linked to the holding by three graded levels of evidence.\n\nCanonical record and methodology: https://github.com/stepuplaw/legal-empirics\nResearch page: https://stepuplaw.com/research/\nAuthor: Kevin D. Klagge, ORCID https://orcid.org/0009-0002-1385-8498\n\nEvery row carries a `statement` column, which is the row written as one English sentence so it can be read and quoted on its own. Column definitions are in datapackage.json; the same data is also described in MLCommons Croissant.",
+  "resources": [
+    {
+      "path": "disputed-terms-national.csv",
+      "description": "Disputed Contract and Instrument Terms in US State Appellate Courts",
+      "schema": {
+        "fields": [
+          {
+            "name": "term",
+            "description": "the disputed language, lowercased and normalised, as the court quoted it",
+            "type": "string"
+          },
+          {
+            "name": "category",
+            "description": "functional drafting class: nexus, degree, temporal, scope, modal, role, succession, property, event, conduct, condition, mental, uncategorised",
+            "type": "string"
+          },
+          {
+            "name": "source",
+            "description": "the instrument the words sit in: testamentary, deed, insurance, contract, statute, constitution, uncertain",
+            "type": "string"
+          },
+          {
+            "name": "posture",
+            "description": "found | rejected | alleged | uncertain -- whether the court held the language ambiguous",
+            "type": "string"
+          },
+          {
+            "name": "link",
+            "description": "direct | proximate | inferred -- strength of the link between this term and the holding; inferred rows must not be pooled with the other two",
+            "type": "string"
+          },
+          {
+            "name": "oid",
+            "description": "CourtListener opinion id",
+            "type": "integer"
+          },
+          {
+            "name": "cid",
+            "description": "CourtListener cluster id",
+            "type": "integer"
+          },
+          {
+            "name": "court",
+            "description": "CourtListener court id",
+            "type": "string"
+          },
+          {
+            "name": "state",
+            "description": "two-letter state postal code",
+            "type": "string"
+          },
+          {
+            "name": "year",
+            "description": "year the decision was filed",
+            "type": "integer"
+          },
+          {
+            "name": "statement",
+            "description": "the row written as one self-contained English sentence, so it can be retrieved, quoted and checked on its own",
+            "type": "string"
+          }
+        ]
+      }
+    }
+  ]
+}

dataset.jsonld

@@ -0,0 +1,116 @@
+{
+  "@context": "https://schema.org",
+  "@type": "Dataset",
+  "name": "Disputed Contract and Instrument Terms in US State Appellate Courts",
+  "description": "One row per (term, decision) pair: a word or phrase a court quoted as the disputed language in a decision containing an ambiguity holding, across the state appellate courts of all 50 states and DC. Terms are extracted from the whole opinion by cue-anchored quotation ('the term \"X\"', '\"X\" as used in'), classified into functional drafting categories, and linked to the holding by three graded levels of evidence.",
+  "url": "https://stepuplaw.com/research/disputed-terms-national/",
+  "identifier": [],
+  "keywords": [
+    "contract interpretation",
+    "ambiguity",
+    "corpus linguistics",
+    "legal drafting",
+    "empirical legal studies",
+    "state courts"
+  ],
+  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
+  "isAccessibleForFree": true,
+  "version": "2026-09-02",
+  "dateModified": "2026-09-02",
+  "creator": {
+    "@type": "Person",
+    "name": "Kevin D. Klagge",
+    "url": "https://stepuplaw.com",
+    "identifier": "https://orcid.org/0009-0002-1385-8498",
+    "sameAs": "https://orcid.org/0009-0002-1385-8498"
+  },
+  "publisher": {
+    "@type": "Person",
+    "name": "Kevin D. Klagge",
+    "url": "https://stepuplaw.com",
+    "sameAs": "https://orcid.org/0009-0002-1385-8498"
+  },
+  "sameAs": [
+    "https://github.com/stepuplaw/legal-empirics",
+    "https://huggingface.co/datasets/stepuplaw/disputed-terms-national",
+    "https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22247377"
+  ],
+  "isBasedOn": {
+    "@type": "SoftwareSourceCode",
+    "identifier": "https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22247377",
+    "codeRepository": "https://github.com/stepuplaw/legal-empirics"
+  },
+  "citation": "(ambiguous OR ambiguity OR ambiguities)",
+  "measurementTechnique": "Full-text retrieval over a local CourtListener corpus, followed by deterministic sentence-level classification. Retrieval is wide and filtering is explicit; the exclusion funnel is reported with counts.",
+  "distribution": [
+    {
+      "@type": "DataDownload",
+      "encodingFormat": "text/csv",
+      "contentUrl": "https://stepuplaw.com/research/disputed-terms-national/disputed-terms-national.csv",
+      "contentSize": "80549261",
+      "sha256": "41794102c0d5c052b40fda0c7779415be95d43a61d08bbbe5462fb66269b11bd"
+    },
+    {
+      "@type": "DataDownload",
+      "encodingFormat": "application/json",
+      "contentUrl": "https://stepuplaw.com/research/disputed-terms-national/datapackage.json"
+    }
+  ],
+  "variableMeasured": [
+    {
+      "@type": "PropertyValue",
+      "name": "term",
+      "description": "the disputed language, lowercased and normalised, as the court quoted it"
+    },
+    {
+      "@type": "PropertyValue",
+      "name": "category",
+      "description": "functional drafting class: nexus, degree, temporal, scope, modal, role, succession, property, event, conduct, condition, mental, uncategorised"
+    },
+    {
+      "@type": "PropertyValue",
+      "name": "source",
+      "description": "the instrument the words sit in: testamentary, deed, insurance, contract, statute, constitution, uncertain"
+    },
+    {
+      "@type": "PropertyValue",
+      "name": "posture",
+      "description": "found | rejected | alleged | uncertain -- whether the court held the language ambiguous"
+    },
+    {
+      "@type": "PropertyValue",
+      "name": "link",
+      "description": "direct | proximate | inferred -- strength of the link between this term and the holding; inferred rows must not be pooled with the other two"
+    },
+    {
+      "@type": "PropertyValue",
+      "name": "oid",
+      "description": "CourtListener opinion id"
+    },
+    {
+      "@type": "PropertyValue",
+      "name": "cid",
+      "description": "CourtListener cluster id"
+    },
+    {
+      "@type": "PropertyValue",
+      "name": "court",
+      "description": "CourtListener court id"
+    },
+    {
+      "@type": "PropertyValue",
+      "name": "state",
+      "description": "two-letter state postal code"
+    },
+    {
+      "@type": "PropertyValue",
+      "name": "year",
+      "description": "year the decision was filed"
+    },
+    {
+      "@type": "PropertyValue",
+      "name": "statement",
+      "description": "the row written as one self-contained English sentence, so it can be retrieved, quoted and checked on its own"
+    }
+  ]
+}

disputed-terms-national.csv

@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1
+oid sha256:41794102c0d5c052b40fda0c7779415be95d43a61d08bbbe5462fb66269b11bd
+size 80549261