“…The research used data that can be accessed freely by the public without special permission or application, the information was defined as not "private " and not involving human subjects. One author (TW), who had previously written a report on state tobacco control policymaking that required interpreting legal regulations, and analyzing their impacts ( Wakefield & Glantz, 2020 ), imported the text of each statute into Atlas.ti for descriptive coding between February 25, 2021, and August 25, 2022. Statutes were iteratively coded to determine the characteristics and restrictions of state expungement programs until default codes were developed for program component themes.…”