South Carolina has the highest eviction rate in the country, and the state chapter of the NAACP wanted to find out why. Given the difficulty of tracking down every case by hand, the organization hoped to use a software program called a "scraper" to collect data from South Carolina's online repository of legal filings.
Researchers, academics, and investigative journalists frequently use scrapers to automate this kind of laborious, large-scale project. But the South Carolina Court Administration categorically bans such automated data collection.
