| --- |
| license: cc0-1.0 |
| language: |
| - en |
| task_categories: |
| - text-retrieval |
| - text-generation |
| size_categories: |
| - 10K<n<100K |
| configs: |
| - config_name: default |
| data_files: data/*.jsonl.gz |
| tags: |
| - legal |
| - law |
| - caselaw |
| - south-dakota |
| - us-law |
| - state-law |
| - court-opinions |
| - public-domain |
| - rag |
| - retrieval |
| - legal-nlp |
| - legal-research |
| pretty_name: South Dakota Case Law |
| --- |
| |
| # South Dakota Case Law |
|
|
| > **Code & tools:** [github.com/docketx](https://github.com/docketx) — [legal-scrambler](https://github.com/docketx/legal-scrambler) pseudonymises a case file on your own hardware before a frontier model sees it; [claude-for-legal](https://github.com/docketx/claude-for-legal) is the Claude Code plugin (`docketx-open-law`) that loads these datasets and checks citations against them. |
|
|
| Full text of 25,593 South Dakota appellate opinion documents from the public record, |
| sliced from the Free Law Project / CourtListener bulk export of 2026-06-30. |
|
|
| Court coverage (1 court ids, explicit allowlist — never prefix-matched): |
| `sd`. |
|
|
| Lead opinions and separate opinions; documents under 1 characters excluded. |
| Slice sha256 `7a175fea94ee27bfb52aa8b32b3596121339f5f08e98314641b76568a8b80c23` (also in `slice.manifest.json`). |
|
|
| ## Composition |
|
|
| Measured on this exact slice: **21,903** documents (85.6%) carry 2,000+ |
| characters of text, 2,815 (11.0%) carry 200-1,999, and 875 |
| (3.4%) are under 200 characters. The short ones are real records, not errors: certiorari |
| denials, one-line orders, and judgment entries. They are kept deliberately (min_chars = 1) |
| so this is the complete public record rather than a filtered subset. Filter on `len(text)` if you want |
| only substantive opinions. |
| |
| ## Format |
| |
| Rows follow **docketx record v1** (one opinion per line): `id`, `doc_type`, `jurisdiction`, `title`, |
| `text`, `source`, `license`, `retrieved_at`, plus `citation`, `court`, `date`, and `extra` |
| (CourtListener opinion/cluster ids, opinion type). The same format is used across every |
| docketx dataset. |
|
|
| ## Provenance and license |
|
|
| Judicial opinions are edicts of government: uncopyrightable works of the public domain |
| (*Banks v. Manchester*, 128 U.S. 244 (1888); *Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org*, 590 U.S. 255 (2020)). |
| This packaging is released under CC0 1.0. Source: CourtListener bulk export (2026-06-30), |
| Free Law Project — https://free.law. This dataset redistributes public-domain court text; it adds no |
| annotation and asserts no rights. |
|
|
| ## Load it |
|
|
| ```python |
| from datasets import load_dataset |
| ds = load_dataset("docketx/us-caselaw-sd") |
| ``` |
|
|
| Part of the DocketRouter legal corpora: https://huggingface.co/docketx |
|
|
