Statutes

Statutes and regulations as the official sources publish them: current version only, with provisions, attachments, licence and attribution. Reference: Legal routes.

Datasets#

An instrument id may contain : and /, for example UK:LEG:ukpga/2020/1 or TW:MOJ:A0000001:en.

Routes#

All need an API key and are strict about parameters.

The id goes in the path raw or percent-encoded. A path ending in /provisions is always the provisions route, so no source id ends that way. A malformed id is 400, a well-formed id that does not exist is 404.

Listing#

Filters combine with AND: dataset, jurisdiction (two uppercase letters), language (zh-Hant, en, ja, ...), kind (act, regulation, order, treaty, other), status (in_force, repealed, abandoned, withdrawn), q (title contains, case-insensitive, 1 to 200 characters; a directory filter, not full-text search), updated_since (YYYY-MM-DD or RFC 3339), include_removed. Order is fixed by instrument_id; limit is 1 to 200, default 50. The cursor is the last instrument_id.

To follow changes, combine updated_since with include_removed=true: marking an instrument as gone from its source updates updated_at.

Reading provisions#

The detail route returns at most 5000 provisions; for a longer instrument provisions_truncated is true and next_from_seq says where to continue with the provisions route. The provisions route takes from_seq (default 0) or cursor (not both), number and limit (1 to 1000, default 500).

number finds an article. Write it as the original (第 184 條, Article 15-1), or as an article key: 184, 184-1, 184之1, 第184條之1, Article 184 and leading zeros all mean the same key, and 184 does not match 184-1 or 1840. The returned number is always the original text. A provision with no numbering (such as 附則) matches only its exact text. A from_seq past the last provision returns 200 with an empty array.

Licence, attribution and restrictions#

Each instrument has license, attribution and restricted; the response meta repeats them de-duplicated (licenses, attribution, restricted when any instrument is restricted). Provision rows carry none of these: use meta. If an instrument is restricted you must show its attribution and the reminder to check the latest version at the source. Licence and attribution strings come from each publisher's terms (Attribution).

An instrument its source stopped listing is still served (removed_on set, with a message saying the content is the last version seen).

Judgments and retrieval#

Taiwan judgments and semantic retrieval are served by a separate set of routes, registered in the same API:

Judgment routes can answer 501 corpus_not_migrated while a corpus is not loaded, 410 taken_down, 503 index_unavailable and 503 retrieval_unavailable (Errors). The per-route reference for these is not generated on this site yet; the argument lists of the MCP compatibility tools (retrieve, search_judgments, lookup_judgment, get_judgment, search_in_judgment, judgment_outline) describe the same operations.

Retrieval is a ranked search over a bounded index, and its responses carry a coverage object that says how the ranking was done (for example coverage.rerank=bm25_fallback when the reranker was unavailable and results are in lexical order). Read coverage before treating an empty result as proof that nothing matches.