pretty_name: 'Supreme Court of the United States: Opinions Relating to Orders'
license: other
license_name: us-government-works
license_link: https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#105
language:
- en
tags:
- legal
- law
- supreme-court
- united-states
- government
- court-documents
size_categories:
- n<1K
configs:
- config_name: opinions-relating-to-orders
data_files:
- split: train
path: opinions-relating-to-orders/data/*.parquet
Supreme Court of the United States: Opinions Relating to Orders
Document files that the Supreme Court's website lists under Opinions Relating to Orders, each with the file itself, byte for byte, and its text. One row per file. This collection does not hold every file the listing links: the status below says what it holds and where the gaps are.
This is the opinions-relating-to-orders config of incrediblecrab/us-scotus-opinions, which holds the collections the site's footer lists under Opinions, and this card is opinions-relating-to-orders/README.md there.
Nothing here is edited by hand, and no text is corrected, normalized or generated. The pipeline and its tests are in github.com/incrediblecrab/us-dataset-products/tree/main/scotus, and this card is rendered from opinions-relating-to-orders/manifest.json in the same commit.
Status
164 files (63.9 MB, 10,226 PDF pages); the listing of 2026-10-28T18:34:14Z linked 200 files from 534 entries. 123 rows are listed now and 41 are no longer listed.
Last complete run: 2026-10-28T18:34:14Z.
Files not stored
The listing links these files, but fetching or reading them failed. A file is tried on every run until it has failed 3 times, then once every 24 hours. 77 files have failed 3 times.
| Text source | Rows |
|---|---|
| born_digital | 164 |
Cross-check of text against pypdf: 164 files compared; 152 agree exactly on the sequence of non-whitespace characters, 158 agree after NFKD normalization of both sides, and the largest difference is 6 characters. pypdf reads the same text layer, so agreeing does not show that text matches the page, and differing does not show that text is wrong: see below.
What is verbatim
fileis the file as the server sent it.file_sha256lets you check it, andurlsays where it came from.textis the PDF's own text layer aspdftotext -raw -enc UTF-8(poppler) prints it, stored unchanged: line breaks, page headers and footers, and a form feed between pages.-rawkeeps the characters in the order the file draws them. The default mode was rejected because it removes a hyphen that ends a line and joins the words;-layoutwas rejected because it dropped characters on a sample file. For an HTML page,textis the text the page renders.- The text layer is the publisher's, and
textkeeps it where it does not say what the page shows. A PDF can declare what a run of its glyphs says (ActualText), and pdftotext prints the declaration in place of the glyphs, so a glyph that a file declares to be no text is not intext.textis plain text and marks no type style, such as italics or underlining, and a letter set in small capitals is whatever character the file maps it to, so an opinion that prints JUSTICE ALITO in small capitals has "Justice Alito" intext. A code point from Unicode's Private Use Areas (U+E000 to U+F8FF, and planes 15 and 16) has no standard meaning: a file's font puts a ligature, a bullet, a dash or another sign there, and onlyfileshows which. U+FFFD, the replacement character, says only that no character is known for a glyph. 31 rows oftexthold 914 Private Use Area code points, and none holds U+FFFD. textholds only born-digital text. When one image covers at least half of a page that has text, the pipeline takes that text for an OCR layer made by whoever scanned the page, and the whole file's text goes toocr_text, to be checked againstfile: on a scanned page it is OCR and not verbatim. The rule errs towardocr_text, because it also catches a born-digital page that one image, such as a map or a photograph, covers at least half of. A file with no text on any page (no_text) has neither.- Every other text field (
title,docket,entries) is the listing page's rendered text, with each run of ASCII whitespace collapsed to one space. No-break spaces, curly quotes and dashes are kept as the page has them. termanddateare read from those strings; the strings themselves stay inentries.
Use
from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("incrediblecrab/us-scotus-opinions", "opinions-relating-to-orders", split="train")
-- DuckDB, straight from the Hub, without the file bytes
SELECT id, term, date, docket, title, text_source FROM 'hf://datasets/incrediblecrab/us-scotus-opinions/opinions-relating-to-orders/data/*.parquet' WHERE listed ORDER BY date DESC LIMIT 10;
Files
opinions-relating-to-orders/data/{partition}.parquet: the rows, sorted by id. Partitions are by October Term.opinions-relating-to-orders/manifest.json: per partition, the row count, SHA-256 and summary counts; the files that failed and why; the listing pages read; the last 20 runs.
Schema
| Column | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
id |
string | The file's path on www.supremecourt.gov, percent-decoded and lower-cased, without the leading slash (the site ignores case). One row per file |
partition |
string | The Parquet file that holds the row (data/{partition}.parquet), assigned when the row was first stored and never changed |
url |
string | Where the file was fetched from |
term |
int32 | October Term, as the listing gives it (for U. S. Reports, the Term in the volume's listing entry; null where that entry names more than one); null where the listing gives none |
date |
string | ISO date read from the listing (decision, argument, order, filing or posting date, or the date a speech's title ends with); null where the listing gives no single date |
docket |
string | Docket number as the listing gives it; for Original Jurisdiction, the case number ("No. 1, Orig.") |
title |
string | Case name or document title as the listing gives it |
entries |
large_string | JSON list of every listing entry that links the file, in listing order: the listing page (listing), the link's href and text (link_text), its title attribute where the page gives one (link_title, the case summary on the opinions pages), its #page anchor (page), the table row it sits in (row, cells keyed by column header) or list item (item), the rendered line that holds it where that is neither (line), and the headings above it (section, group, subgroup). All strings are the page's text (rendered text, or the title attribute) with runs of ASCII whitespace collapsed to one space; no other character is changed. term, volume and year are numbers the pipeline read from the page or its address; docket (Argument Audio) is the link's text, and document_type (pdf, html, audio or video) is the kind of file the pipeline took the link for, in the collections whose listings mix them |
listed |
bool | Whether the latest complete listing still links the file. Rows are never deleted; a file the Court stops listing stays with listed = false |
media_type |
string | application/pdf, text/html for HTML documents, audio/mpeg for MP3 audio, or video/mp4 for MP4 video |
file |
large_binary | The file's bytes exactly as the server sent them |
file_sha256 |
string | SHA-256 of file |
file_size |
int64 | Length of file in bytes |
etag |
string | The ETag header the server sent with file |
last_modified |
string | The Last-Modified header the server sent with file |
pages |
int32 | Page count (pdfinfo); null for HTML, audio and video |
image_pages |
int32 | Pages on which one image covers at least half the page |
ocr_pages |
int32 | Pages that have text and are image pages, whose text the pipeline takes for an OCR layer |
text_source |
string | born_digital (the PDF's own text; in text), scanned or mixed (every page with text, or only some, is an image page, whose text the pipeline takes for OCR; in ocr_text), no_text (no page has text or the file is audio/video), or html |
text |
large_string | The file's own text, unchanged: the text layer of a born-digital PDF as pdftotext -raw prints it (form feed between pages), or the rendered text of an HTML page; see What is verbatim for where that differs from the page. Null when the pipeline takes the file's text for OCR |
ocr_text |
large_string | The same pdftotext -raw output when the pipeline takes the PDF's text for an OCR layer made by whoever scanned it (see ocr_pages). On a scanned page it is OCR, which misreads characters, so it is not verbatim. The same rule catches a born-digital page that one image, such as a map or a photograph, covers at least half of, and that page's text is the file's own |
extractor |
string | Program, version and options that produced text or ocr_text |
xcheck_extractor |
string | The independent extractor used for the cross-check (pypdf); null when there was no cross-check (only text from PDFs is cross-checked) |
xcheck_equal |
bool | Whether pypdf yields the same sequence of non-whitespace characters as text |
xcheck_equal_nfkd |
bool | The same comparison after NFKD normalization of both sides (ligatures and compatibility characters decomposed) |
xcheck_delta |
int64 | Characters (after NFKD, whitespace ignored) that one extraction has and the other lacks, counted without regard to order |
metadata |
large_string | JSON: the PDF's document information (pdfinfo), extraction notes, and the response headers kept |
first_seen_at |
string | When the pipeline first stored this file (UTC) |
fetched_at |
string | When the stored bytes were fetched (UTC) |
checked_at |
string | When the pipeline last confirmed the stored bytes are current: by fetching again or by the server's validators (UTC) |
delisted_at |
string | When the listing stopped linking the file (UTC); null while listed |
Notes on this collection
- Several opinions can share one PDF; the row holds the file once, with one entry per opinion, and an entry's page is the #page anchor of its link where the link has one.
- The pages for October Terms 2005 through 2010 list 57 opinions in tables without a link to any file, only a citation to the U. S. Reports (counted September 25, 2026), so those terms have no rows here.
- Where
texthas the Private Use Area code point U+E405 or U+E406, the page prints fi or fl: each of the 196 words that U+E405 occurs in, across Opinions of the Court, Opinions Relating to Orders and U. S. Reports, and each of the 36 that U+E406 occurs in reads as a word or a name with fi or fl in its place, sotextspells OfficeOf\uE405ceand NetflixNet\uE406ix(counted September 26, 2026). A search oftextfor such a word misses those rows unless it allows for the two code points. - Only one version of a file is kept: the one fetched at
fetched_at. A run asks the server whether stored files changed only when it is run with--revalidate-all, which asks (HEAD) about every stored file and fetches again the ones whose ETag, Last-Modified or Content-Length moved, and reads every HTML page again.checked_atsays when a row was last confirmed against the server, and the Hub's commit history holds earlier versions of the Parquet files.
How it is updated
The pipeline reads every listing page of the collection, fetches files it has not stored, updates the listing fields of files whose entries changed, and marks files that are no longer listed. Requests are paced to at least 1.1 seconds apart, as the site's robots.txt asks (Crawl-delay: 1), with the user agent us-dataset-products-scotus and a link to the repository.
License
The Supreme Court's own pages and documents (including its opinions, orders, calendars, lists and journals, its rules, forms and guides, its press releases, media advisories and reports, and its About pages) are works of the United States Government, which are not subject to copyright in the United States (17 U.S.C. § 105). This card does not give legal advice; check the status of any document you rely on.
The pipeline's code is under the MIT License (github.com/incrediblecrab/us-dataset-products/tree/main/scotus).