VTCourts

A small, dependency-free Vermont court interface layer for routing an address to the correct county-based Superior Court Unit.

fromvtcourtsimportLocation, build_default_finderfinder=build_default_finder()
finder.unit_for(Location(city="Burlington"))
# UnitMatch(unit="Chittenden", county="Chittenden County", ...)

Vermont has one Superior Court Unit per county. Civil, Criminal, Family, and Probate are divisions of that unit, so the same geographic resolver can be used by all four. find_units() returns all candidates; unit_for() returns a single result only when the input resolves to one county.

ZIP codes are treated as mailing areas rather than legal boundaries. The packaged data preserves every municipality associated with a ZIP, including cross-county ZIPs such as 05487, 05676, 05143, 05363, and 05733. A supplied municipality or county is preferred to ZIP expansion; a ZIP-only request may therefore correctly return more than one Unit.

The municipality and ZIP table is based on Vermont’s public municipality data. For production filing decisions, callers should still validate an ambiguous result against the address/geocoder or the Judiciary’s current court-location directory. Vermont GIS describes its boundary layer as suitable for general mapping rather than legally definitive.

API

• Location accepts city, county, state, ZIP, street address, and optional coordinates.
• CourtFinder.find_units() resolves one or more county Units.
• CourtFinder.find() returns the four corresponding division records.
• CourtFinder.find_by_postal_code() handles ZIP-only input.
• location_from_object() adapts a docassemble-like Address object.