{
  "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"
          }
        ]
      }
    },
    {
      "name": "disputed-terms-national-parquet",
      "path": "disputed-terms-national.parquet",
      "format": "parquet",
      "mediatype": "application/vnd.apache.parquet",
      "bytes": 13491680,
      "rows": 286846,
      "hash": "sha256:6413e4a714109851594077589eef1ef9d0aac5367dab90dd3fa236b83cd65d7c"
    }
  ],
  "provenance": {
    "repository": "https://github.com/stepuplaw/legal-empirics",
    "commit": "1524ffac73d194b895be2eaac16430be96d97299",
    "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
    }
  }
}