“Criminal Municipal Courts” was published in the January 2021 issue of the Harvard Law Review. It presents new data collected from all of the thirty states that authorize the creation of municipal courts, including the number of courts in each state, their criminal caseloads, their legal characteristics, and the revenues they generate. The Article uses these data to offer the first comprehensive description and analysis of the lowest tier of the American criminal system.
Here, the Harvard Law Review and the Article’s author collaborated with the data visualization team at TWO-N to translate key data from the Article into an interactive visualization. All of the underlying data and sources are contained in the notes to the Article’s Appendix. Additional data have been posted on Dataverse and can be accessed through the author’s Municipal Courts Project website.