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Comment by manyatoms | Hacker News Reader

is there a dataset/torrent with all the underlying laws?

Right now it's just a bunch of crawlers for the individual states. If there's interest, I could periodically stand up snapshot torrents or something. That something you'd be interested in?

Alternatively, if someone else knows an all-in-one option that exists, I wouldn't mind retiring those crawlers...

Not op, but that's a very interesting proposition. While the law and legal code are technically property of the people, I'm not aware of any single point of download for it all.

There’s no single point of download for it all because there’s thousands of autonomous entities that issue law and adjudicate cases, at least 51 of them distinct sovereign entities.

We could enforce (suggest?) a common format / api at the federal level. Especially if it’s incentivized with funding that more than justifies the cost of maintenance. Similar to how federal interstate funding is only available to states with a 21+ drinking age.

Govinfo.gov is neat because you see the different attempts at common formats that have been attempted in the past.

Yeah, going to the courts and municipal code seems like it's going to be a heavy lift. Many of them seem to hang off of municode, though, so maybe it's not a huge number of unique crawlers.

OK, I just bundled it into a torrent, available here: https://law.agentlookups.ai/downloads/

If you decide to give it a download, let me know if you have any issues with it/suggestions for improvement.

There is none, not for statutes and definitely not for case law; even at the appellate level where you have multiple federal circuits, then 50 states, then territories, military, tribal and a whole host of other niche courts. And the appellate court systems can be split into districts, and by lower and higher levels.

Then if you want to really get into it, The People should also be able to access trial court level, and at that point you have over 3000 distinct court systems with their own access systems, usually requiring logins and CAPTCHAs, and half of them not even having anything accessible online at all, and the other half only having recent stuff online and the rest rotting in a flooded basement.

We have hosted bulk case law at Free Law Project for over a decade: https://wiki.free.law/c/courtlistener/help/api/bulk-data

That’s awesome! I especially like RECAP as a method for freeing things from PACER.

Seems like you all are already doing a lot of what I’ve been aiming for with mine. Are there useful ways to contribute, or have you all gotten it to a pretty good place technically, and it’s mostly a matter of spreading it at this point?

A third-party project converted an official XML source of German laws to Markdown documents, but the repo is a bit dormant:

- https://okfn.de/en/projekte/bundesgit

- https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze

https://axiom.org is working on this but very early.

Cool, thanks for the pointer!

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