vaquill/open-us-law

Open US Law: the statutory codes of every US jurisdiction

1,983,394 state and territorial statute sections covering all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico (52 jurisdictions), plus 54,853 sections of the United States Code, and 7,762 constitution sections from 52 jurisdictions. One schema throughout.

Snapshot v2026.07, 2026-07-21. Total 2,046,009 sections.

US statutory law is public domain, but the structured version has never been openly available. Every state publishes its code differently, none offer bulk download, and the usable versions live inside commercial products. This is that layer, free and openly licensed.

The scrapers that produced it are public under Apache-2.0 at github.com/Vaquill-AI/open-us-law, so this corpus is independently reproducible rather than something you have to take on trust. Every jurisdiction's ingestion script is in that repo.

Licensing, stated precisely

• The statutory text is in the public domain. Under the government edicts doctrine (Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, 590 U.S. 255 (2020)), edicts of government carry no copyright. We assert no rights over the text.
• The compilation, normalization, and structuring is offered under CC BY 4.0.
• The scrapers are Apache-2.0.

You cannot license what you do not own, so we are explicit about which of the three applies to what.

What makes this different from a raw scrape

Sections carry status, so you can exclude repealed law from an index rather than citing dead statutes as though they were operative:

• in_force: 1,979,276
• repealed: 49,056
• reserved: 13,839
• omitted: 1,833
• transferred: 1,532
• renumbered: 373
• recodified: 53
• expired: 23
• vacant: 21
• not_funded: 2

Sections also carry citation, full title/chapter hierarchy, breadcrumb path, subsection counts, and cross-references into the US Code and CFR where present.

Coverage

Federal (the United States Code) is listed separately from the 52 state and territorial jurisdictions, since it is a different corpus rather than a 53th state.

Jurisdiction	Statute sections	Size
United States Code (federal)	54,853	88.7 MB
CA	161,429	71.1 MB
MS	158,688	83.3 MB
TX	122,535	39.9 MB
IN	83,148	28.2 MB
IL	72,456	27.7 MB
NJ	55,897	28.4 MB
WA	51,498	26.8 MB
NV	48,190	19.4 MB
AL	45,984	22.5 MB
LA	43,474	27.2 MB
MI	40,658	24.9 MB
NY	40,102	39.2 MB
SD	39,589	13.3 MB
MD	39,552	18.9 MB
AR	36,936	22.5 MB
OR	36,202	22.6 MB
OK	35,329	21.7 MB
NM	34,455	15.6 MB
CO	34,231	24.5 MB
VA	33,856	20.7 MB
OH	33,161	24.2 MB
TN	32,693	21.3 MB
MT	30,514	15.2 MB
SC	29,947	15.4 MB
MO	29,296	19.2 MB
ND	29,042	13.2 MB
IA	28,223	15.1 MB
GA	28,154	18.6 MB
MN	27,747	23.2 MB
NC	26,685	17.1 MB
NE	25,997	14.3 MB
UT	25,880	17.3 MB
WV	25,460	16.3 MB
NH	25,375	12.2 MB
ME	25,316	17.6 MB
FL	24,866	24.2 MB
KS	24,361	14.5 MB
DC	23,694	12.1 MB
PR	23,636	13.5 MB
VT	23,521	12.3 MB
MA	23,152	15.3 MB
ID	22,754	13.9 MB
AZ	22,674	14.8 MB
DE	21,649	12.7 MB
RI	21,107	10.0 MB
KY	20,894	14.5 MB
WI	18,158	14.7 MB
AK	17,935	8.3 MB
HI	16,446	10.5 MB
CT	16,082	13.5 MB
PA	14,547	8.5 MB
WY	10,219	5.3 MB

Honest limitations

• This is a dated snapshot, not a live feed. It reflects the sources as of 2026-07-21. New snapshots are published quarterly. Always cite the version.
• Coverage quality is not uniform. Some jurisdictions publish clean structured sources; others required considerable parsing, and section counts vary for genuine reasons (states differ enormously in how they subdivide).
• Not all sections carry a source link. Where a jurisdiction's text was not obtained from an official publisher, we do not publish a source URL rather than pointing at a third party.
• This is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for verifying current law. Statutes are amended continuously. Check the official source before relying on any section.

Reproducing this dataset

Every scraper that produced this corpus is open source: github.com/Vaquill-AI/open-us-law (Apache-2.0).

You can rebuild any jurisdiction from its official source and check the result against what is published here. That is deliberate: an open corpus you cannot audit is just a file you are asked to trust.

Bulk download (mirror)

Every file is also mirrored on a zero-egress Cloudflare R2 bucket, on a domain we control, so a copy exists independent of the Hub:

• Directory listing: https://oss-data-us.vaquill.ai
• Everything in one file: https://oss-data-us.vaquill.ai/v2026.07/open-us-law-v2026.07-parquet.tar
• Machine manifest (per-file SHA256): https://oss-data-us.vaquill.ai/index.json

The mirror is byte-identical to the Hub (same SHA256 manifest) and supports HTTP range requests, so you can query the Parquet directly without downloading it.

Loading

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("vaquill/open-us-law", "statutes", split="train")
ca = load_dataset("vaquill/open-us-law", data_files="us_ca_statutes.parquet")

Bulk files are also mirrored for direct download, with a SHA256 manifest.

Citation

@misc{openuslaw202607,
  title  = {Open US Law: Structured Statutory Codes of the United States},
  author = {Vaquill AI},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {Snapshot v2026.07},
  url    = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/vaquill/open-us-law}
}