CyanEclipseTechnologies/usc-title-26-verbatim

U.S. Code Title 26 — Verbatim, Hash-Sealed

The complete text of Title 26 of the United States Code (the Internal Revenue Code), published as canonical per-section text where every section carries its own SHA-256 hash and the whole corpus is sealed in a signed manifest with two independent Merkle roots — so any passage, section, or the entire corpus can be verified byte-for-byte by anyone, without trusting the publisher.

This dataset is the sealed corpus behind Eclipse Verbatim (Cyan Eclipse Technologies LLC), an MCP server that serves this text with cite-checking against the sealed hashes.

Source

• Publisher of the source text: Office of the Law Revision Counsel (OLRC), U.S. House of Representatives.
• Source artifact: USLM XML, release point Public Law 119-124 (xml_usc26@119-124.zip, uscode.house.gov).
• Source integrity: the zip and XML SHA-256 values are recorded in manifest.json (source.zip_sha256, source.xml_sha256), so the chain from the public source file to this dataset is recomputable end to end.
• Snapshot: usc26-119-124-de68dcc8b3db, sealed 2026-10-26, canonicalization verbatim-canon/1.1. This snapshot supersedes usc26-119-124-3ba6c8dc5ce0 (canon 1.0); exactly one section changed between seals (26 USC §7519). Full lineage in snapshot_history.json and build_record.json.

Claim limit — read this first

Title 26 is not positive law. This is the OLRC-published text of Title 26 at the named release point, identified by hash; where the Code text and the Statutes at Large conflict, the Statutes at Large control.

Title 26 has not been enacted as positive law, so this dataset claims exactly — and only — that it reproduces the OLRC-published text at release point PL 119-124, identified by the hashes in the manifest.

Contents

File	What it is
data/statutory.jsonl	2,277 rows, one per section: citation, identifier, status, heading, canonical statutory text, per-section SHA-256.
data/editorial.jsonl	2,277 rows, one per section: the OLRC editorial apparatus (amendment notes, references-in-text notes, source credits) under its own per-section hash.
manifest.json	The signed seal: per-section hashes and census, both Merkle roots, manifest hash, source hashes, signer block.
CANONICALIZATION.md	verbatim-canon/1.1 — the complete, normative transform from the public OLRC XML to the exact bytes hashed (the recompute contract).
build_record.json	Build record for this snapshot (census, source hashes, supersession).
snapshot_history.json	Append-only snapshot lineage.

Census: 2,277 sections total — 2,015 operative, 241 repealed, 17 renumbered, 2 reserved, 2 omitted; 2,162 carry a USLM identifier, 115 do not (they are keyed by citation, per the manifest's §7.5 rule).

The two layers are never blended (build law)

The statutory text and the editorial notes are separate layers with separate hashes and separate Merkle roots (corpus_root / editorial_root). Editorial notes are OLRC apparatus, not law, and no note text ever appears inside a statutory row or a statutory hash. This segregation is what makes a statutory-hash mismatch a detector for note bleed rather than a matter of trust.

How to verify

1. Any section: take the text of a statutory row, encode UTF-8, SHA-256 it — the digest must equal the row's sha256 and the manifest entry's canonical_text_sha256. Same procedure for editorial rows against notes_sha256.
2. The whole corpus: recompute the two Merkle roots over the per-section hashes in manifest order (procedure: CANONICALIZATION.md §7.4 — an internal node is the SHA-256 of the concatenated raw 32-byte child hashes; an odd trailing node is promoted unchanged) and compare to corpus_root / editorial_root in manifest.json.
3. From scratch: download the public OLRC zip named in the manifest, apply CANONICALIZATION.md (§5–§7, §8.1) exactly, and rebuild every byte, hash, root, the manifest hash, and the snapshot id. An independent re-implementation from the published rules alone converged on this seal at 2,277/2,277 sections in both layers.

About the signature

The manifest's signature is an HMAC-SHA-256 made through the product's signing port with a fixture key, labelled "kind": "fixture" in the manifest itself. It demonstrates the seal format; it is not production key custody and is not presented as such. The verification chain above (source hashes → per-section hashes → Merkle roots → manifest hash) stands on its own and needs no key at all.

License / public-domain status

The statutory text and editorial apparatus are works of the United States federal government (OLRC) and are not subject to copyright in the United States (17 U.S.C. § 105). The added artifacts of this dataset — the canonicalization, per-section hashes, Merkle roots, and manifest — are published by Cyan Eclipse Technologies LLC for verification and reuse; cite the snapshot id when you rely on a hash.

Not legal advice

This dataset reproduces statutory text and verification artifacts. It contains no interpretation, guidance, or advice, and it is not a substitute for the Statutes at Large or for counsel.

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Published by Cyan Eclipse Technologies LLC · cetech.ai · inquire@cetech.ai · Product: Eclipse Verbatim (eclipsebazaar.com)