Our goal is to archive, process, and understand the documents, including laws and judicial opinions, that provide the framework for our society. We especially care about archiving versions of these documents in an easy to process format (such as text or Markdown) and with medium-neutral cross-references between them. We're starting with the United States.

All use of this project is subject to the NOTICE. This content may be inaccurate or incomplete, should not be used for official purposes, and is not legal advice. Not affiliated with any government agency. See NOTICE for further disclaimers.

The data

We've collected some of the important documents that govern our society from the U.S. government. We host processed, marked-up, transformed, etc. versions of these documents - they are unofficial and may be inaccurate and incomplete; this is a work in-progress. Our data include:

History of the U.S. Code - view »

We've processed each 'release point' (an update to the U.S. code created after every few Public Laws passed by Congress) made by the U.S. House of Representatives OLRC and turned it into a text-like Git repository so you can see how public law has changed over time with Git diff 'red-lines'. We currently cover over 75 iterations of the law from mid-2013 to the present and are working on getting older data. For example:

• How P.L. 113-227 affected 35 U.S.C. § 2
• How P.L. 113-81 affected 18 U.S.C. § 2320
• The state of the U.S. Code at P.L. 114-153

U.S. Supreme Court Opinions

We have:

• 2003 through 2015 slip and misc. opinions and
• 1937 through 1975 FLITE opinions

Reference Resolution - view »

Documents often contain cross-references to others using citations (such as legal citations) instead of using modern URLs. We're trying to resolve those to both our documents and government websites in a standard way, for example using USLM references, such as:

• /us/usc/t2/s3 - 2 U.S.C. § 5301
• /us/pl/105/225 - P.L. 105-225
• /us/stat/120/205 - 120 Stat. 205 aka USA PATRIOT Act update
• /us/stat/1/1 - 1 Stat. 1 aka the Declaration of Independence

We hope to someday host and cross-reference all of these types of documents our-selves, but until then links to various government websites are also provided.

U.S. Constitution - view »

In handy Markdown format!

You can find a full list of our data projects at our GitHub organization page.

The software

Generally, we scrape, transform, and mark-up the documents using software developed and hosted on our publicdocs-platform repository.

The people

This software and project is currently being developed by @advayDev1.

Copyright © 2016-2018 Advay Mengle and the authors of the https://github.com/publicdocs project. No claim made to original US government works. All use of this project is subject to the NOTICE. This content may be inaccurate or incomplete and should not be used for official purposes.