README.md

---
license: other
license_name: mixed-official-government-sources
language: [en]
task_categories: [text-retrieval, question-answering]
size_categories: [10K<n<100K]
tags: [legal, law, pro-se, self-represented, court-forms, self-help, us-law, access-to-justice, rag]
pretty_name: US Pro Se — court self-help guides, instructions and forms
configs:
- config_name: all
  data_files: data/*/pro-se.jsonl.gz
  default: true
dataset_info:
  config_name: all
  features:
  - name: id
    dtype: string
  - name: level
    dtype: string
  - name: jurisdiction
    dtype: string
  - name: kind
    dtype: string
  - name: title
    dtype: string
  - name: text
    dtype: string
  - name: court
    dtype: string
  - name: source_url
    dtype: string
  - name: license
    dtype: string
  - name: retrieved_at
    dtype: string
  - name: extra
    dtype: string
---

# US Pro Se — what the courts themselves tell people who have no lawyer

> **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.

**12,103 documents** from **19 state court systems**: 2,835
self-help guide pages, 727 instruction documents and
8,541 forms, 119,978,550 characters of text, each held verbatim with the exact URL it
came from.

Most people in a US civil case have no lawyer. The material that actually serves them — how to ask
for a fee waiver, how to serve papers, what a small-claims hearing looks like, which form number to
file — is published by the courts, scattered across fifty websites, and collected by nobody. This is
that layer.

## This is not the law

**Forms and instructions are not statutes and not case law.** A court's self-help page explains a
procedure; it does not create one, and it can be out of date or wrong about your situation. Nothing
here should be quoted as authority, cited as law, or treated as legal advice. Where you need the law
itself, use `docketx/us-statutes`, `docketx/court-rules` and `docketx/us-caselaw` — and the `kind`
column here (`self-help-guide` / `instructions` / `form`) is there so a retrieval system never
confuses the two.

## What is in it

| state | documents | guides | instructions | forms | crawl | publisher | hosts |
|---|--:|--:|--:|--:|---|---|---|
| Washington (`wa`) | 2,845 | 708 | 227 | 1,910 | complete | Washington State Administrative Office of the Courts | `www.courts.wa.gov` |
| California (`ca`) | 2,637 | 1,041 | 4 | 1,592 | complete | Judicial Council of California (Self-Help Guide to the California Courts) | `courts.ca.gov`, `selfhelp.courts.ca.gov` |
| Wisconsin (`wi`) | 1,952 | 143 | 7 | 1,802 | complete | Wisconsin Court System (Self-help law center) | `www.wicourts.gov` |
| Hawaii (`hi`) | 1,042 | 49 | 113 | 880 | complete | Hawaii State Judiciary (Self-Help) | `www.courts.state.hi.us` |
| Maine (`me`) | 910 | 20 | 15 | 875 | complete | State of Maine Judicial Branch | `www.courts.maine.gov` |
| Nebraska (`ne`) | 864 | 156 | 7 | 701 | complete | Nebraska Judicial Branch (Nebraska Online Legal Self-Help Center) | `nebraskajudicial.gov` |
| Virginia (`va`) | 523 | 28 | 0 | 495 | complete | Virginia Judicial System, Office of the Executive Secretary (Court Self-Help) | `selfhelp.vacourts.gov`, `www.vacourts.gov` |
| Utah (`ut`) | 326 | 254 | 50 | 22 | complete | Utah State Courts (Self-Help) | `www.utcourts.gov` |
| South Dakota (`sd`) | 298 | 81 | 58 | 159 | complete | South Dakota Unified Judicial System (Self Help) | `ujs.sd.gov` |
| Iowa (`ia`) | 232 | 36 | 194 | 2 | still crawling (338 URLs queued) | Iowa Judicial Branch | `www.iowacourts.gov` |
| Illinois (`il`) | 192 | 101 | 20 | 71 | complete | Office of the Illinois Courts (Illinois Supreme Court) | `www.illinoiscourts.gov` |
| Delaware (`de`) | 174 | 170 | 4 | 0 | complete | Delaware Judiciary (Delaware Courts Self-Help Center) | `courts.delaware.gov` |
| Oregon (`or`) | 51 | 26 | 1 | 24 | complete | Oregon Judicial Department (Self-Help Center) | `www.courts.oregon.gov` |
| Rhode Island (`ri`) | 20 | 2 | 11 | 7 | complete | Rhode Island Judiciary (Self-Help Center) | `www.courts.ri.gov` |
| Kentucky (`ky`) | 17 | 5 | 12 | 0 | complete | Kentucky Court of Justice (Self-Help Portal) | `www.kycourts.gov` |
| Alabama (`al`) | 6 | 4 | 2 | 0 | complete | Alabama Supreme Court and State Law Library | `judicial.alabama.gov` |
| Maryland (`md`) | 6 | 5 | 1 | 0 | complete | Maryland Judiciary (Maryland Court Help Center) | `www.mdcourts.gov` |
| Idaho (`id`) | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | complete | Idaho Supreme Court (Self-Help) | `api.isc.idaho.gov`, `isc.idaho.gov` |
| Indiana (`in`) | 4 | 3 | 1 | 0 | complete | Indiana Judicial Branch (Self-Service Legal Center) | `www.in.gov` |

Every count is measured from the `.jsonl.gz` file in `data/` on 2026-09-11 — not estimated, and not
taken from any index page's own total. "still crawling" means the harvester's own queue is not yet
empty for that state, so its count will grow; every other state's crawl ran until it had nothing
left to fetch.

### Fields

| column | meaning |
|---|---|
| `id` | stable record id (state, kind, URL path, URL hash) |
| `level` | always `state` |
| `jurisdiction` | two-letter state code |
| `kind` | `self-help-guide` (a court self-help web page), `instructions` (an official guide/handbook document), or `form` (a court form) |
| `title` | the document's own title, verbatim |
| `text` | the full text, verbatim — `pdftotext -layout` where the official document is a PDF |
| `court` | the publishing court or agency |
| `source_url` | the exact URL fetched |
| `retrieved_at` | ISO-8601 UTC |
| `license` | what the source asserts, plus any reservation that travels with the record |
| `extra` | JSON string — `format`, `text_chars`, and for PDFs `pdf_bytes` and the extraction method |

## How it was collected, and what we refused to take

The first request to every host was `https://<host>/robots.txt`, sent as
`DocketRouterBot/1.0 (+https://docketrouter.ai/bot)`. That file is stored verbatim next to the
harvest and its rules are enforced in code:

- a `Disallow` matching a path we wanted means that path was **not fetched**;
- a `robots.txt` we could not read — WAF 403, HTTP 401 — means the **whole host was skipped**,
  because unverifiable is not permission;
- `Crawl-delay` was honoured, with a 1 request/second floor regardless;
- we never changed user-agent to get around a block.

Per-state consequences of that policy:

- **Alabama (`al`)** — Alabama's official self-help layer is genuinely this thin: the State Law Library publishes the small-claims guide and the appellate snapshot, and nothing else.
- **Iowa (`ia`)** — **`ai-train=no`** — see the reservations section. Iowa also declares `Crawl-delay: 30`, which we honour, so this state fills in slowly: its crawl is still running.
- **Idaho (`id`)** — Idaho Supreme Court tier only. The Court Assistance Office forms library (`courtselfhelp.idaho.gov`) sits behind a WAF that 403s its own `robots.txt`, so it is unverifiable and was not crawled.
- **Illinois (`il`)** — Form PDFs are served from `ilcourtsaudio.blob.core.windows.net`, whose `robots.txt` returned **HTTP 401** — unreadable, so that host was not crawled. HTML pages only.
- **Maryland (`md`)** — `mdcourts.gov/robots.txt` carries `Disallow: /courtforms` — the Maryland forms library is **excluded by robots** and is not here.

## Reservations that travel with the data

- **Iowa** — `iowacourts.gov/robots.txt` carries, verbatim,
  `Content-Signal: search=yes,ai-train=no,use=reference`. That is a separate grant from `Disallow`,
  and we honour it: the Iowa records are for **retrieval and reference only and must not be used as
  training data**. The reservation is stamped into every Iowa record's `license` field.
- **Texas is absent because its host stopped answering.** `texaslawhelp.org/robots.txt` had been
  readable (HTTP 200) when the source was verified on 2026-09-10, but on the harvest run it returned
  **HTTP 202 with an empty body** — a bot-management interstitial, not a robots file. Unreadable
  means unverifiable, so the crawl aborted before its first content request and Texas is not in this
  dataset. (Separately, when that host was readable its terms reserved commercial use:
  *"Free. Not for sale ... you agree not to sell or make a profit in any way from any information or
  forms that you obtained through this website."*)
- **Alaska is deliberately absent.** Its source is verified and harvestable, but the Alaska Court
  System asserts copyright over its self-help publications — the Small Claims Handbook cover reads
  *"reproduction of any part of this handbook for commercial purposes without the express written
  permission of the Alaska Court System is strictly prohibited."* Rather than redistribute it, we
  hold Alaska pending a licensing decision. It is withheld, not missing.
- Everything else is an official US state judiciary publication. State government works are not
  automatically public domain the way federal works are, so we do not claim a licence the source
  does not grant: each record's `license` field says exactly what the source asserted, which for
  most of these is nothing at all.

## A state that is not in the table is UNVERIFIED, not withheld

That is the standing rule for every DocketX dataset. A missing state means we have not yet proved
its source live — official host, `robots.txt` read for our honest bot, and one real passage
extracted — not that the state refused. Twelve jurisdictions (`ct dc fl ks ma mn nc nd nj ny ok sc`)
were checked on 2026-09-10 and are blocked today, mostly by WAFs that refuse our `robots.txt`
request; they stay out until that changes. The rest are simply not done yet.

## Companion datasets

`docketx/us-caselaw` · `docketx/us-statutes` · `docketx/court-rules` · `docketx/us-judges`