tentatives

California superior court tentative rulings, court calendar notes, and other perishable ruling-adjacent material.

The point is preservation first, parsing second. The archive keeps the court source material. The data pipeline normalizes counties only after the parser has fixtures and tests.

San Francisco Superior Court's general civil, housing, probate, and asbestos litigation departments live in a sibling repo: aimesy/sfsc-tentatives (searchable viewer). The San Francisco rows in this repo are the Unified Family Court (UFC) calendars only. Everything else SF posts — Departments 204 (Probate), 301 (Discovery), 302 (Civil Law and Motion), 304 (Asbestos Law and Motion), and 501 (Real Property) — is over there.

• Viewer: aimesy.github.io/tentatives
• Chrome extension: tentatives-extension.zip
• Firefox extension: tentatives-extension-firefox.zip
• Contact: me@amyc.us

Status

Capture support means this repo can find and archive court source material.

Parser support means archived material is converted into normalized rows in data/<county>/rulings.parquet.

County	Capture	Parser	Notes
Contra Costa	yes	yes	PDFs, archive pages, and changed HTML page captures for ruling pages and probate calendar notes.
El Dorado	yes	yes	Probate, civil law and motion, probate calendar, and family law PDF styles.
Placer	yes	yes	Civil law and motion PDFs.
Amador	yes	yes	Legacy dropdown PDFs from public archive/Wayback sources. Current post-02/15/2022 access appears portal-based.
Calaveras	yes	no	Case-management and civil law-and-motion PDFs.
Fresno	yes	no	Law and Motion department PDFs.
Merced	yes	no	Weekday civil law-and-motion PDFs.
Nevada	yes	yes	Static ruling page. Word documents are not yet archived.
Orange	yes	yes	Stable current PDF URLs; changed hashes matter.
Plumas	yes	no	Department 2 PDFs.
Riverside	yes	no	Regional and department PDF links.
San Bernardino	yes	no	Legacy civil table.
San Francisco	yes	yes	Unified Family Court (UFC) family-law PDFs only. Departments 204 / 301 / 302 / 304 / 501 (civil, probate, discovery, asbestos, real property) live in aimesy/sfsc-tentatives.
Santa Clara	yes	yes	Department PDF pages; changed hashes matter.
Shasta	yes	yes	Department PDFs; changed hashes matter.
Solano	yes	yes	Civil and probate department PDFs.
Tuolumne	yes	no	Tentative rulings and Case Notes.

See docs/county-plans.md for the broader county triage.

Parsed Date Coverage

This section reflects normalized rows in data/<county>/rulings.parquet. Capture-only counties can have archived PDFs without appearing here.

Amador - 11 rulings across 2 PDFs

Division	Department	First hearing date	Last hearing date	Rows
Civil Case Management Conference	3	2015-09-21	2015-09-21	8
Civil Law and Motion	1	2022-04-11	2022-04-11	3

Nevada - 589 rulings across 60 PDFs

Division	Department	First hearing date	Last hearing date	Rows
Case Management	6	2026-03-02	2026-05-18	165
Case Management	A	2026-02-20	2026-04-17	32
Case Management	Unspecified	2026-03-09	2026-05-18	59
Guardianship	3	2026-05-07	2026-05-07	15
Guardianship	A	2026-01-26	2026-01-26	3
Law and Motion	4	2026-03-13	2026-03-13	1
Law and Motion	5	2026-04-03	2026-04-03	1
Law and Motion	6	2026-04-24	2026-05-22	7
Law and Motion	A	2026-01-12	2026-05-11	3
Law and Motion	Unspecified	2026-01-12	2026-05-22	154
Probate	6	2026-03-06	2026-05-22	107
Probate	A	2026-05-11	2026-05-11	1
Probate	Unspecified	2026-01-12	2026-05-15	41

Orange - 296 rulings across 36 PDFs

Division	Department	First hearing date	Last hearing date	Rows
Civil	C11	2026-05-18	2026-05-18	11
Civil	C12	2026-05-15	2026-05-15	12
Civil	C13	2026-05-15	2026-05-15	8
Civil	C15	2026-05-18	2026-05-18	15
Civil	C23	2026-05-14	2026-05-21	29
Civil	C25	2026-05-19	2026-05-19	11
Civil	C26	2026-01-30	2026-01-30	1
Civil	C27	2026-05-18	2026-05-18	2
Civil	C28	2026-05-18	2026-05-18	11
Civil	C32	2026-05-19	2026-05-19	13
Civil	C33	2026-05-14	2026-05-21	22
Civil	C34	2026-05-21	2026-05-21	9
Civil	C44	2026-05-07	2026-05-07	8
Civil	CM2	2026-05-21	2026-05-21	14
Civil	CX101	2026-05-22	2026-05-22	8
Civil	CX103	2026-05-18	2026-05-18	17
Civil	CX105	2026-05-14	2026-05-21	26
Civil	N14	2026-05-18	2026-05-18	9
Civil	N15	2026-05-18	2026-05-18	18
Civil	N17	2026-05-18	2026-05-18	2
Civil	Unspecified	2025-10-24	2026-05-20	9
Civil	W15	2026-05-21	2026-05-21	11
Family Law	C22	2025-12-05	2025-12-05	3
Probate	C10	2026-05-21	2026-05-21	1
Probate	C21	2026-05-15	2026-05-15	9
Probate	CM04	2026-01-16	2026-01-16	1
Probate	CM05	2026-05-20	2026-05-20	2
Probate	CM06	2026-05-14	2026-05-14	2
Probate	CM08	2026-05-20	2026-05-20	8
Probate	CM3	2026-05-06	2026-05-06	1
Probate	Unspecified	2026-05-20	2026-05-20	3

San Francisco - 175 rulings across 23 PDFs

Division	Department	First hearing date	Last hearing date	Rows
Family Law	403	2026-04-21	2026-05-21	90
Family Law	404	2026-04-21	2026-05-21	82
Family Law	414	2026-03-26	2026-05-07	3

Santa Clara - 73 rulings across 12 PDFs

Division	Department	First hearing date	Last hearing date	Rows
Civil Law and Motion	10	2026-05-19	2026-05-21	11
Civil Law and Motion	12	2026-05-15	2026-05-20	11
Civil Law and Motion	13	2026-05-08	2026-05-20	17
Civil Law and Motion	6	2026-05-19	2026-05-21	13
Law and Motion	1	2026-05-19	2026-05-21	17
Probate Law and Motion	2	2026-05-07	2026-05-18	4

Shasta - 133 rulings across 9 PDFs

Division	Department	First hearing date	Last hearing date	Rows
Civil / Probate / Family Law	24	2024-06-10	2024-06-10	1
Civil / Probate / Family Law	42	2026-05-04	2026-05-18	19
Civil / Probate / Family Law	6	2023-05-22	2023-05-22	1
Conservatorships	44	2026-05-18	2026-05-18	46
Law and Motion	53	2022-06-06	2022-06-06	9
Law and Motion	63	2026-05-18	2026-05-18	26
Law and Motion	64	2026-05-18	2026-05-18	22
Law and Motion	Unspecified	2026-05-01	2026-05-01	3
Trusts	44	2026-05-18	2026-05-18	6

Solano - 37 rulings across 7 PDFs

Division	Department	First hearing date	Last hearing date	Rows
Civil	3	2026-05-19	2026-05-22	5
Civil	7	2026-05-19	2026-05-22	12
Civil	8	2026-05-21	2026-05-21	5
Probate / Civil	22	2026-05-21	2026-05-21	14
Probate / Civil	5	2025-12-23	2025-12-23	1

How It Works

1. The extension or ingest.backfill discovers public court material.
2. PDFs are fetched, hashed, and stored once at archive/<county>/<sha[:2]>/<sha>.pdf.
3. PDF fetches are logged in archive/<county>/captures.ndjson.
4. Contra Costa HTML page captures are stored at archive/contra-costa/pages/<sha[:2]>/<sha>.html.
5. HTML page captures are logged in archive/contra-costa/page-captures.ndjson.
6. Page-layout fingerprints are stored at archive/<county>/layouts/<sha[:2]>/<sha>.json.
7. Layout captures are logged in archive/<county>/layout-captures.ndjson.
8. python -m ingest.orchestrate parses archived material into Parquet.
9. site/ loads Parquet files. It does not download archived PDFs on startup.

Re-capture is cheap. For ordinary PDF URLs, the extension skips URLs already logged. For Orange, Santa Clara, Shasta, and Tuolumne, it fetches and hashes first because courts reuse the same filenames while changing the contents. For Contra Costa HTML pages and layout fingerprints, only changed hashes are logged.

Extension

Install the release zip for your browser. For Firefox development, load extension/ unpacked. For Chrome side-panel development, use the Chrome release zip generated by the extension workflow.

Open Settings and set a GitHub token with Contents read/write access. Owner, repo, and branch default to aimesy/tentatives@master.

The side panel can:

• upload PDFs from the active supported court tab;
• fetch one listed court page;
• scan every page for one county;
• scan selected counties, with all configured counties selected by default;
• shell-scan selected counties in parallel browser tabs, pausing if a page needs manual attention;
• pause, resume, or stop a long scan;
• retry a failed landing page three times before moving on.
• document page layout fingerprints the first time a page is scanned, then again only when the structure changes.

Contra Costa should be opened through the public court pages, not the internal iframe URLs. The extension keeps cc-courts.org permission because the official Contra Costa pages load that host in an iframe, and the content script must read the frame.

Backfill

Run live or Wayback capture from the command line:

python -m ingest.backfill --county all --live --continue-on-error
python -m ingest.backfill --county all --wayback --continue-on-error --limit 25 --dry-run
python -m ingest.backfill --county amador --wayback --url-from-year 2020 --url-to-year 2022
python -m ingest.backfill --county orange --live --wayback --limit 25

--county all means the CLI-backed counties. It does not include browser-only flows that need an iframe or active page execution.

The GitHub workflow runs live capture daily. It also runs a bounded Wayback check weekly because current URLs may acquire archived versions later.

Wayback has not been broadly backfilled yet. The local archive currently shows one Wayback row, for Amador. Start bounded, then widen.

Parse

Install dependencies and run tests:

python -m venv .venv
. .venv/Scripts/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt pytest
pytest
python -m ingest.orchestrate --dry-run

Run one county:

python -m ingest.orchestrate --county contra-costa --dry-run
python -m ingest.orchestrate --county contra-costa --reparse-existing --dry-run
python -m ingest.orchestrate --max-sources-per-county 50

By default, ingest.orchestrate skips source hashes already represented in Parquet. Use --reparse-existing for parser migrations. The Actions workflow parses at most 50 new sources per county per run so archive bursts do not turn into long failing jobs. The parser registry is intentionally narrow. Capture-only counties stay in the archive until a parser has fixtures and tests.

Layout

schema/                          shared Capture and Ruling records
counties/<county>/scraper.py     discovery and parser code
counties/<county>/tests/         fixtures and parser/discovery tests
ingest/backfill.py               live and Wayback capture into archive/
ingest/orchestrate.py            archive -> data/<county>/rulings.parquet
archive/<county>/captures.ndjson PDF capture provenance
archive/<county>/pages/          changed HTML page captures, currently Contra Costa
archive/<county>/layouts/        changed page-layout fingerprints
data/<county>/rulings.parquet    normalized rows for the viewer
extension/                       browser capture extension
site/                            static viewer

Adding A County

1. Add counties/<slug>/__init__.py with COUNTY_SLUG and PARSER_VERSION.
2. Add discovery in counties/<slug>/scraper.py.
3. Add fixture HTML and discovery tests.
4. Add parser tests only after you have representative source files.
5. Implement parse(...) -> list[Ruling].
6. Register the parser in ingest/orchestrate.py.
7. Add extension support only when the browser path is needed or useful.

Filename and link-text hints are allowed for capture. Parser facts should come from the source document or page text whenever possible.

Sharp Edges

• Capture support is not parser support.
• Existing rows are keyed by ruling_id; changing parser_version alone does not force a reparse.
• captures.ndjson may contain several rows for one SHA.
• Nevada can publish .docx; this repo is still PDF-first.
• Contra Costa page captures are normalized as page rows, not as PDF rulings.
• Login-backed or authenticated systems are out of scope unless there is a public lawful access path.