If there is any cartel that deserves to be broken its legal search. May they die a miserable death.

Yeah, it should be freely available, you have to be able to know the rules you're supposed to obey in order to obey them well. I've been making a free API for US law search, you can point whatever model you want at it: https://law.agentlookups.ai/

Very much a work in progress, only federal and state so far, no municipal codes yet, and no case law yet. Big hole, I know. Also working on making the search ranking work better.

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manyatoms 5 hours ago | parent [-]

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

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ericd 5 hours ago | parent [-]

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...

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timschmidt 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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ericd 41 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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rayiner 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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datsci_est_2015 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	Something1234 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Govinfo.gov is neat because you see the different attempts at common formats that have been attempted in the past.

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ericd 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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qingcharles 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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rzzzt 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

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tfehring 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

	▲	ericd 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Cool, thanks for the pointer!

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elpakal 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> By using the legal search index, Astra for Law can search U.S. case law, statutes, regulations, court rules, and administrative decisions across a corpus of more than 230 million URLs, with sources added daily. Our work with Free Law Project, the nonprofit behind CourtListener, brings its case-law collection covering more than 99.9% of published U.S. precedential case law (opens in a new window) into this research experience.

Found that to be very interesting

	▲	rayiner 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		CourtListener already has an MCP interface and Grok is quite good at pulling from it. In my experience, Grok 4.6 is quite good at analyzing legal cases and human-written documents. Better than Opus 5. I'm not sure if it's better than Fable 5.1 on that task, b/c I'm not willing to spend my precious Fable tokens on case law searches lol.

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teiferer 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Let's swap it out for the AI cartel!