voilaj/swiss-legislation

Swiss Legislation (article-level)

Private companion to voilaj/swiss-caselaw. Article-level export of Swiss statutory law: 751,017 article rows across two configs.

• federal (federal/fedlex.parquet) — 401,313 article rows from Fedlex (the Federal Council's official consolidated law portal, SPARQL-sourced). Public domain.
• cantonal (cantonal/<canton>.parquet, one shard per canton) — 349,704 article rows across all 26 cantons. Sourced by direct scraping of the official cantonal law portals for 19 cantons, with LexFind as fallback for the rest. The text_source column preserves this provenance per row.

Why private

Fedlex is public-domain and freely redistributable. The cantonal side mixes direct-portal text with LexFind-fallback rows, whose bulk republication we keep private. A federal-only public release is a separate, later decision. Treat this repo as an internal working mirror, not a redistribution.

Schema

federal

column	type	notes
sr_number	string	Systematic Compilation (SR) number
law_title	string	title in the article's language
abbreviation	string	official abbreviation
article_num	string	e.g. Art. 41
heading	string	marginal note / article heading
text	string	verbatim article text
language	string	de / fr / it (/ rm)
consolidation_date	string	Fedlex consolidation date
work_uri	string	Fedlex work URI
source	string	always fedlex

cantonal

column	type	notes
canton	string	2-letter canton code
sr_number	string	cantonal systematic number (where available)
law_title	string
category	string	subject category
article_num	string
seq	int64	article order within the law
heading	string
text	string	verbatim article text
language	string
is_active	int64	1 = currently in force
text_source	string	provenance label: direct-portal scraper id (e.g. zhlex_pdf) vs lexfind fallback
original_url	string	source document URL
version_active_since	string	version validity start
lexfind_id	string	LexFind law id (join key)
source	string	always cantonal

Provenance and freshness

Derived from the same nightly pipeline that backs mcp.opencaselaw.ch (statutes.db for federal, cantonal_laws.db for cantonal). Rows with empty article text are excluded. Not a substitute for the official portals for legally-binding text; the original_url / work_uri columns point back to the authoritative source.

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

fed = load_dataset("voilaj/swiss-legislation", "federal", split="train")
zh  = load_dataset("voilaj/swiss-legislation", "cantonal",
                   data_files="cantonal/zh.parquet", split="train")

Licensed data upstream: Fedlex (public domain); cantonal portals + LexFind under their respective terms. CC0 does not apply to the cantonal LexFind-fallback rows.