https://www.lawyerland.com/research/feed.xml2026-10-14T12:00:00-04:00LawyerLand https://www.lawyerland.com/research/state-statute-source-availability-2026-10/#v-2026.22026-10-14T12:00:00-04:00

The second reading of a first-party, reproducible measurement: can an identified, non-JavaScript HTTP client 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, 26 returned the cited section and 21 did not (25 of 47 in the August 2026 reading). Failures by class: section text absent 5, pdf only 4, blocked by server 3, js shell 3, tls certificate error 2, dns resolution failed 2, not found 2. 9 jurisdictions changed class since August with the same section URL: California (not_fetched_robots_disallow → blocked_by_server); Connecticut (connection_failed → tls_certificate_error); Illinois (not_found → tls_certificate_error); Iowa (pdf_only → dns_resolution_failed); Michigan (connection_failed → blocked_by_server); New Hampshire (connection_failed → machine_readable); Tennessee (connection_failed → not_found); Vermont (connection_failed → machine_readable); Wisconsin (machine_readable → dns_resolution_failed). This version splits failed connections by their network error class (an incomplete TLS certificate chain, a failed DNS lookup) so that a failure is attributed to what actually failed, and it moves both controls to govinfo.gov after the previous control host began answering missing pages with HTTP 200.

https://www.lawyerland.com/research/ai-crawler-policy-state-statute-sources-2026-08/#v-2026.12026-08-16T12:00:00-04:00

A first-party, reproducible measurement of what each U.S. jurisdiction's official statutory website publishes in its /robots.txt about fourteen named AI crawlers retrieving a citable statute section. Of 47 official sources, 44 publish no rule naming any AI crawler. Three do — Alaska, the District of Columbia and Idaho — and two of those three carry an identical eight-token list alongside a content delivery network's own crawler token, which is a platform default rather than a drafted policy. Fourteen of the 47 publish no robots.txt at all, four could not be read on this date and are recorded as unverified rather than permitted, and one, California, instructs every automated client to stay out entirely, Googlebot included; 42 of 47 permit Googlebot to reach the cited section. This measures published policy, not behaviour and not accessibility: robots.txt is a request an obedient client honours, and the absence of a rule is the absence of a decision rather than a decision to permit.

https://www.lawyerland.com/research/state-statute-source-availability-2026-08/#v-2026.12026-08-15T12:00:00-04:00

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.

https://www.lawyerland.com/research/us-directory-inventory-july-2026/#v-2026.12026-08-03T12:00:00-04:00

A reusable snapshot of LawyerLand's United States directory inventory, separating published listing rows from distinct law firms and populated city-by-practice pages so the quantities cannot be mistaken for one another.