Datasets:

docketx
/

us-caselaw-wa

license: cc0-1.0
language:
  - en
task_categories:
  - text-retrieval
  - text-generation
size_categories:
  - 100K<n<1M
configs:
  - config_name: default
    data_files: data/*.jsonl.gz
tags:
  - legal
  - law
  - caselaw
  - washington
  - us-law
  - state-law
  - court-opinions
  - public-domain
  - rag
  - retrieval
  - legal-nlp
  - legal-research
pretty_name: Washington Case Law

Washington Case Law

Full text of 150,274 Washington appellate opinion documents from the public record. The base slice is 150,239 documents from the Free Law Project / CourtListener bulk export of 2026-06-30. data/wa-delta-2026-06-29-to-2026-09-11.jsonl.gz ADDS 35 opinions filed after that snapshot, harvested directly from CourtListener's live search API and its own object storage (never a state court's own search portal, several of which disallow automated access) — added 2026-09-14.

Court coverage (3 court ids, explicit allowlist — never prefix-matched): wash, washctapp, washterr.

Lead opinions and separate opinions; documents under 1 characters excluded. Slice sha256 bbeef8b9e605cf2479a33dfb29b0d98c005ed657f6099a3d2ad9347e82b2a5fe (also in slice.manifest.json).

Composition

Measured on this exact slice: 91,345 documents (60.8%) carry 2,000+ characters of text, 45,663 (30.4%) carry 200-1,999, and 13,231 (8.8%) 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

from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("docketx/us-caselaw-wa")

Part of the DocketRouter legal corpora: https://huggingface.co/docketx