{
  "@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"
    },
    {
      "@type": "DataDownload",
      "encodingFormat": "application/vnd.apache.parquet",
      "contentUrl": "https://stepuplaw.com/research/disputed-terms-national/disputed-terms-national.parquet",
      "contentSize": "13491680",
      "sha256": "6413e4a714109851594077589eef1ef9d0aac5367dab90dd3fa236b83cd65d7c"
    }
  ],
  "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"
    }
  ]
}