Puerto Rico Custody Litigation Caseload Dataset and Extraction Pipeline (FY2010–FY2025)

This record contains an extracted, reconciled, and analyzed dataset of family-court custody-related case filing statistics from Puerto Rico's judicial branch, spanning sixteen consecutive fiscal years (FY2010–FY2025), along with the complete Python extraction and analysis pipeline used to produce it.

The dataset was compiled by parsing the "Movimiento de casos de relaciones de familia" (family relations caseload) tables from the Anuario Estadístico del Poder Judicial de Puerto Rico, the annual statistical report published by the Oficina de Administración de los Tribunales (Office of Court Administration). It tracks new filings, dispositions, and pending caseloads for custody, patria potestad (parental authority), and related compound causes of action across the study period.

This dataset was compiled to support empirical analysis in [CITE ARTICLE TITLE / AUTHOR / FORTHCOMING JOURNAL ONCE PLACED], which examines Puerto Rico's non-adoption of the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act (UCCJEA) and its implications for interstate and territorial custody disputes. The dataset establishes that Puerto Rico's underlying custody caseload is large and stable — averaging approximately 2,090 new Custodia filings per year (SD=170) across the full study period — situating the doctrinal jurisdictional gap examined in the accompanying article within an active, ongoing docket rather than a hypothetical or rare edge case.

What is included

• pr_custody_filings_extracted.csv — the final tidy dataset, one row per fiscal year per cause-of-action category, including filing counts, table-format provenance, a data-quality flag (comparable_across_years), and a plain-text note explaining any reconciliation issues or methodological caveats specific to that row
• [notebook filename].ipynb — the complete, documented Python/Colab notebook that performs extraction, reconciliation, and statistical analysis (descriptive statistics, Mann-Kendall trend tests, stationarity tests, segmented regression/Chow-test structural break analysis)
• dataset_metadata.json — machine-readable metadata including package versions used, SHA-256 checksums of all 16 source PDFs, and a summary of known manual overrides
• pr_custody_trends.png, pr_custody_event_study.png, pr_custody_breakpoint_comparison.png — generated visualizations
• [If included] The 16 source PDF reports (Anuarios Estadísticos, FY2010–FY2025), reproduced here for archival completeness and reproducibility, sourced from Puerto Rico's Poder Judicial public website

Methodology summary

Puerto Rico's Anuario reports use two distinct table layouts across the study period: a 13-column "materia y causa" format nesting specific causes of action under aggregate subject headers (FY2010–FY2019), and an 11-column flat "causa de acción" format with no header aggregation (FY2020–FY2025). The extraction pipeline infers table format on a per-page basis (not per fiscal year), since FY2019 — the year Puerto Rico's judiciary migrated case-management systems from SIMEC to SUMAC-Civil mid-year — contains pages in both formats representing two genuinely non-overlapping case populations that must be summed to obtain an accurate annual total.

Every extracted row is checked against internal arithmetic identities expected to hold by construction. A distinction is drawn between hard reconciliation failures (which exclude a row from the analytic sample) and informational discrepancies — small, consistent closing-balance mismatches that plausibly reflect genuine case-reclassification adjustments in the underlying court records rather than extraction error, and which are retained with a disclosed note rather than excluded.

One data point (FY2019 "Custodia," the pre-migration SIMEC-system page) could not be reliably parsed by the automated pipeline despite multiple extraction strategies; its value was obtained by direct manual transcription from the source PDF, cross-verified against the table's internal arithmetic, and is applied via a documented, disclosed override rather than silently patched. Full methodological detail, including the rationale for each design decision, is provided in inline documentation throughout the notebook.

Key empirical findings

• Custody ("Custodia") filings were stable across the study period: mean 2,090/year, median 2,040/year, SD 170, no significant linear or Mann-Kendall trend over the full 16-year span (p>0.5 for both).
• A segmented regression identified a statistically significant structural break in the Custodia filing trend at fiscal year 2018 (Chow test F=5.96, p=0.016): a significant upward pre-2018 trend (+68 cases/year, p=0.007) reversed to approximately flat following FY2018 (slope change of −91 cases/year, p=0.009).
• This break coincides with three contemporaneous, confounded events: Hurricane Maria (landfall September 2017), the enactment of Puerto Rico's Law 102-2018 (governing relocation of minors), and the SIMEC-to-SUMAC-Civil case-management system migration (FY2019). This dataset's design cannot individually attribute the break to any one of these three developments.
• A robustness check testing an alternative break point at fiscal year 2020 (isolating Puerto Rico's 2020 Civil Code revision) found no comparable structural break (Chow test F=1.97, p=0.18), suggesting the 2020 Civil Code revision is not an independent driver of the FY2018 pattern, though it does not further disaggregate the three FY2018–19 candidate causes from one another.

Known limitations

• This dataset measures aggregate custody caseload volume; Puerto Rico's public statistical reporting does not isolate the subset of filings specifically involving interstate or mainland-U.S.-connected jurisdictional disputes, which is the precise phenomenon of doctrinal interest in the accompanying article. The aggregate volume is offered as evidence of scale and administrative significance, not as a direct count of interstate disputes.
• The "Patria potestad" category is not directly comparable across the FY2010–2019 and FY2020–2025 periods: under the earlier table format it appears as a narrow sub-category nested within the broader "Custodia" subject heading, while under the later format it is a standalone cause of action with a substantially broader scope. A pre/post-2020 statistical comparison on this category will show a large, apparently significant difference that reflects this definitional change, not a substantive shift in filing behavior; users of this dataset should not interpret that comparison as a real trend.
• With n=16 annual observations, stationarity tests (ADF, KPSS) and structural-break tests are inherently low-powered; results are reported with explicit caveats in the notebook and should be treated as descriptive rather than confirmatory.

License

• Derived dataset (CSV, JSON): [e.g., CC-BY 4.0]
• Source PDFs: Puerto Rico government public records;

Related identifiers

• Is supplement to: [DOI or URL of the accompanying law review article, once published]
• Is derived from: Oficina de Administración de los Tribunales, Poder Judicial de Puerto Rico, Anuario Estadístico del Poder Judicial de Puerto Rico (annual), https://poderjudicial.pr

Keywords

Puerto Rico; family law; child custody; UCCJEA; jurisdiction; conflict of laws; judicial statistics; empirical legal studies; territorial law; interrupted time series

Language

English (code, analysis); Spanish (source data terminology, preserved in category labels)