Machine-Readability of Official U.S. State Statutory Sources — August 2026

Version 2026.1 · Published 2026-08-15 · Coverage 2026-08-15/2026-08-15

A first-party, reproducible measurement of whether an identified, non-JavaScript HTTP client can retrieve the text of one specific citable statutory section from each U.S. jurisdiction's own official online source on a single request. Of 47 jurisdictions with an official source URL, 25 returned the cited section and 22 did not, for reasons that are properties of the publishing systems rather than of the law: PDF-only publication, client-side rendering, connection failures, robots exclusion, server blocks, and link rot. This release publishes the per-jurisdiction outcomes, the HTTP evidence behind each one, the positive and negative controls, and the limits on what the figure means.

Measured quantity: whether an identified, non-JavaScript HTTP client can retrieve the text of one specific citable statutory section from a U.S. jurisdiction's official online source on a single request

Downloads

Plain-text citation · BibTeX · Machine-readable release metadata

Methodology

  1. One personal-injury limitation-period section was chosen per jurisdiction (50 states and the District of Columbia) as the retrieval target, and the URL of that section on the jurisdiction's own official statutory website was recorded in advance.
  2. For each jurisdiction, robots.txt was fetched FIRST from the section URL's host and parsed for the wildcard user-agent group. Where robots.txt disallowed the path, the section was NOT requested and the jurisdiction was recorded as not_fetched_robots_disallow.
  3. Where robots.txt permitted it, the section URL was requested exactly once with a GET, following redirects, using an identifying User-Agent that carries a contact URL, with a 25-second timeout.
  4. A second request was made to the scheme-and-host origin of that same URL, derived mechanically from it and never authored separately, so that a failure at the section URL could be distinguished from a host that does not serve an identified client at all.
  5. Responses were classified in this order: connection_failed (no response), blocked_by_server (401/403/429), not_found (404/410), server_error (5xx), pdf_only (a PDF body, never parsed), js_shell (HTTP 200 carrying fewer than 400 characters of text after markup removal), machine_readable (the cited section identifier appears in the extracted text), and section_text_absent (HTTP 200 with substantial text in which the cited identifier does not appear).
  6. HTML entity decoding places dash-like entities before the generic numeric-entity sweep, so that a section rendered with a non-breaking hyphen is not silently mangled into a different identifier before it is searched for.
  7. Two controls were run before the audit and both had to pass or nothing would have been written: a positive control on a known-good federal source outside the audited set, which had to classify machine_readable, and a negative control on an impossible path on that same host, which had to classify not_found.
  8. At least five seconds separated consecutive requests, each URL was requested once, no form was submitted, and no block, rate limit or robots exclusion was circumvented.
  9. All counts in this release are computed over official_primary sources only. Four jurisdictions for which no official source URL was available to the auditor are retained in the data with source_class marking them and are excluded from every total.

Coverage and limitations

Data dictionary

VariableTypeDescription
state_codestringTwo-letter postal abbreviation for the jurisdiction (50 states plus DC).
statestringJurisdiction name.
source_classstringofficial_primary where the URL is the jurisdiction's own official statutory website; third_party_NOT_OFFICIAL where no official URL was available to the auditor. Only official_primary rows are counted in any published total.
statute_sectionstringThe citable statutory section used as the retrieval target for this jurisdiction.
section_urlstringThe exact URL requested for that section.
hoststringHostname of the section URL.
section_outcomestringClassification of the section request: machine_readable, section_text_absent, pdf_only, js_shell, blocked_by_server, not_found, connection_failed, server_error, other_status, or not_fetched_robots_disallow.
section_http_statusintegerHTTP status returned for the section request; 0 where no response was received, and empty where robots.txt meant no request was made.
section_content_typestringContent-Type header returned for the section request, without parameters.
section_bytesintegerSize in bytes of the section response body.
section_text_charsintegerCharacter count of the section response after script, style and markup removal and whitespace collapse. The threshold separating js_shell from a text response is 400.
origin_outcomestringClassification of a request to the scheme-and-host origin of the section URL: html_ok where the host served an HTML body, otherwise the same failure vocabulary as section_outcome.
origin_http_statusintegerHTTP status returned for the origin request.
robots_txtstringResult of parsing the wildcard user-agent group of robots.txt on that host for the section path: allowed, disallowed_this_path, disallow_all, no_wildcard_group, or no_robots_txt.
retrieved_atstringISO-8601 timestamp with US/Eastern offset at which this jurisdiction's row was measured.

Sources and provenance

License and citation

This release is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Attribution identifies the source; LawyerLand does not require a followed hyperlink as a condition of access.

LawyerLand (2026-08-15). Machine-Readability of Official U.S. State Statutory Sources — August 2026 (Version 2026.1) [Data set]. https://www.lawyerland.com/research/state-statute-source-availability-2026-08/

Version history

This is version 2026.1. Prior version directories remain immutable. Material corrections receive a new version and release-feed entry.

Press and data contact · Release feed