Topics present in state court documents responsive to the covid-19 pandemic

The researchers engaged in a comprehensive website mapping exercise (complementing that of NCSC’s Court Statistics Project), identifying the websites for each court (and/or court level) within each state court system in the United States. Each of these websites was then checked for guidance that was posted for court users and employees, including administrative orders, warnings, notices, how-to guides, and other updates related to the pandemic. Research assistants then downloaded all documents accessible on these sites. This dataset is thus meant to be broadly representative of the activity in state courts during the pandemic, but due to the nature of this collection effort we do not make the claim that we have collected all documents distributed by state courts during the study period. This data release consists of validated documents (dates, topics, court levels) from March 2020 (N=3714).