AIDS-Related Written Court Decisions in Federal and State Courts, 1984-1989: [United States]

This data collection was designed to identify the party characteristics, case attributes, and idea structures of written court decisions related to Auto-Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Written court decisions related to AIDS in state and federal courts were located via the LEXUS and WESTLAW data systems. For a case to be eligible, it had to address an issue involving AIDS or involve a party who was believed to be infected with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), and a legal decision had to provide sufficient written material to analyze. Coding was completed by three individuals with legal training based on a team-developed codebook. Except in those areas where a preliminary test showed 90-percent reliability, variables were coded based on a consensus rule. Variables include court jurisdiction, whether the case was civil or criminal, case issue area, gender of plaintiff, relationship between parties, demand and primary purpose of the demand by the defendant and the plaintiff, what the court explicitly relied upon for its decision, whether the plaintiff or defendant had AIDS, AIDS-Related Complex (ARC), or was HIV-infected, and whether the plaintiff or defendant was gay, an IV drug user, a prisoner or an accused criminal, a member of a stigmatized group, or a racial or an ethnic minority. The unit of analysis is the written court decision.