Using court documents as data: opportunities and challenges for sociolegal scholarship

Though the use of court documents as data is widespread within US sociolegal scholarship, their use remains surprisingly undertheorized as a methodological practice. This article, therefore, asks, what differentiates court materials from other forms of documentary data, and how do these attributes impact claimsmaking in law and society scholarship? Drawing on varied empirical examples from existing scholarship, we uncover five distinctive attributes: their multitemporality, their dialogic nature, the multiple truths they house, their multivocality, and their social productivity. Considering these attributes, we argue that court documents unite our diverse field of scholarship in two important ways. First, as an essential output of the legal system, they are arguably “our” data, shaping law and society as we know it today. Second, they both reify and obscure the power dynamics that make social inequality so durable, helping inequality appear “just.” Despite their underexploited promise for theory-building in sociolegal research, we also discuss the practical, epistemic, and ethical pitfalls to their use. Ultimately, ignoring these rich yet complex documents is to our field’s analytic peril.