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StepUpLaw/statutory-staleness-fl

Statutory Staleness in Florida Appellate Construction Holdings One row per (decision, statutory section) pair where a Florida appellate court construed the meaning of a Florida statute, with whether that section has been amended since the decision and, where two editions of the code are held, whether the operative text actually changed. A citator reports whether a case was overruled by another case; it is far weaker on the other way a holding dies, which is that the legislature… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/StepUpLaw/statutory-staleness-fl.

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Statutory Staleness in Florida Appellate Construction Holdings

One row per (decision, statutory section) pair where a Florida appellate court construed the meaning of a Florida statute, with whether that section has been amended since the decision and, where two editions of the code are held, whether the operative text actually changed. A citator reports whether a case was overruled by another case; it is far weaker on the other way a holding dies, which is that the legislature amended the statute and no court has had occasion to say so. This dataset measures that gap directly.

19,085 rows. Licence CC BY 4.0. Not legal advice.

Where this comes from


Canonical record	https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22247377
Code and methodology	https://github.com/stepuplaw/legal-empirics
Research page	https://stepuplaw.com/research/
Author	Kevin D. Klagge, ORCID 0009-0002-1385-8498
Source corpus	CourtListener bulk export, snapshot 2026-06-30

The DOI above identifies the code, which is a different object from this dataset. Cite the code when you are describing the method and cite this dataset when you are using the numbers.

Columns

Column	Type	Meaning
`oid`	integer	CourtListener opinion id
`cid`	integer	CourtListener cluster id
`name`	string	case name as reported
`court`	string	CourtListener court id
`year`	integer	year the decision was filed
`cites`	integer	times the decision has been cited, per CourtListener
`section`	string	Florida Statutes section construed, e.g. 732.615
`last_amended`	integer	most recent amendment year in the section history trail
`amendments_since`	integer	count of amendments after the decision
`gap_years`	integer	years between the decision and the most recent later amendment
`exposed`	integer	1 where the section was amended after the decision; an UPPER BOUND, not a finding of abrogation
`tier`	string	amendment-screen	text-diff -- text-diff is only available where an edition at or before the decision year is held
`text_changed`	integer	1 where the operative text differs between the edition in force at the decision and the current edition; null outside the text-diff tier
`similarity`	number	SequenceMatcher ratio between the two editions operative text, history trail excluded
`edition_at_decision`	integer	the statute edition used as the baseline for the diff
`sentence`	string	the sentence in which the section was construed, verbatim
`statement`	string	the row written as one self-contained English sentence

Every row carries a statement column, which is the row written as one self-contained English sentence. A row of codes can be downloaded but not retrieved or quoted, and the sentence is what makes each row usable on its own.

How it was built

Retrieval and extraction are deterministic code over a local corpus of 10.8M US judicial opinions. Classification uses rules written against a hand-coded sample that ship with their measured accuracy, so the error rate is reported rather than assumed. Every study states its exclusion funnel with counts, because silent filtering is the commonest defect in research on opinions and it is invisible in the result.

datapackage.json carries the Frictionless schema, croissant.json the MLCommons Croissant description, and dataset.jsonld the schema.org form.

Limits

This is exploratory. The coded samples behind it were coded once, so it supports a described pattern rather than a measurement. Inter-annotator reliability has not been established.

Published appellate opinions are not disputes. Most disputes settle, most settlements are unpublished, and appellate coverage varies by court and decade. Any rate here is a rate among decisions that reached an appellate court and were published, which is not the same population a drafter cares about.

Read the study's own limitations section in the repository before quoting a number. Each one names the specific threats to its own validity, including the ones that are unflattering.