README.md

metadata

license: cc0-1.0
language:
  - en
task_categories:
  - text-retrieval
  - question-answering
size_categories:
  - 1M<n<10M
tags:
  - legal
  - law
  - statutes
  - us-code
  - federal-law
  - state-law
  - us-law
  - public-domain
  - rag
  - legal-nlp
pretty_name: US Statutes — federal and state (verbatim)
configs:
  - config_name: all
    data_files: data/*/statutes.jsonl.gz
    default: true
dataset_info:
  config_name: all
  features:
    - name: id
      dtype: string
    - name: level
      dtype: string
    - name: jurisdiction
      dtype: string
    - name: code
      dtype: string
    - name: section
      dtype: string
    - name: citation
      dtype: string
    - name: title
      dtype: string
    - name: text
      dtype: string
    - name: source
      dtype: string
    - name: license
      dtype: string
    - name: retrieved_at
      dtype: string
    - name: extra
      dtype: string

US Statutes — held word for word

Code & tools: github.com/docketx — legal-scrambler pseudonymises a case file on your own hardware before a frontier model sees it; claude-for-legal is the Claude Code plugin (docketx-open-law) that loads these datasets and checks citations against them.

1,295,620 statute sections: the whole United States Code (60,433 sections, all 53 titles) plus 27 states (1,235,187 sections), each section as its legislature publishes it, with the URL it was taken from. Statutes are the law a court applies; a paraphrase is not usable in a filing, so the text here is verbatim.

Ask "what does 42 U.S.C. § 1983 say" and this dataset answers with the section, not a summary of it.

jurisdiction	sections	codes
United States (federal) (us)	60,433	United States Code, all 53 titles
California (ca)	162,431	Government Code, Health and Safety Code, Education Code …
Texas (tx)	122,681	Special District Local Laws Code, Government Code, Health & Safety Code …
Oregon (or)	72,649	Oregon Revised Statutes
Illinois (il)	72,162	Illinois Compiled Statutes
New Jersey (nj)	56,003	New Jersey Statutes (General and Permanent Statutes, offici…
Nebraska (ne)	55,413	Nebraska Revised Statutes
Louisiana (la)	52,622	Louisiana Revised Statutes, Louisiana Civil Code, Louisiana Code of Civil Procedure …
Washington (wa)	51,174	Revised Code of Washington
Alabama (al)	49,240	Code of Alabama 1975
Iowa (ia)	47,238	Iowa Code
Maine (me)	45,774	Maine Revised Statutes
Montana (mt)	44,609	Montana Code Annotated, Constitution of the State of Montana
South Dakota (sd)	40,484	South Dakota Codified Laws, Constitution of the State of South Dakota
New York (ny)	34,826	Public Authorities Law, Education Law, Environmental Conservation Law …
Virginia (va)	33,082	Code of Virginia Title 15.2 (Counties, Cities and Towns), Code of Virginia Title 38.2 (Insurance), Code of Virginia Title 46.2 (Motor Vehicles) …
Rhode Island (ri)	32,579	Rhode Island General Laws
North Carolina (nc)	31,706	North Carolina General Statutes
Connecticut (ct)	29,710	Connecticut General Statutes
Kansas (ks)	29,265	Kansas Statutes Annotated
Utah (ut)	28,311	Utah Code
North Dakota (nd)	25,269	North Dakota Century Code
Florida (fl)	24,993	Florida Statutes ch. 627 (Title XXXVII), Florida Statutes ch. 626 (Title XXXVII), Florida Statutes ch. 403 (Title XXIX) …
Delaware (de)	23,125	Delaware Code
Idaho (id)	21,784	Idaho Code
Alaska (ak)	20,205	Alaska Statutes
Wisconsin (wi)	14,534	Wisconsin Statutes, Wisconsin Rules of Civil Procedure (statutory)
Minnesota (mn)	13,318	Minnesota Statutes ch. 609, Minnesota Statutes ch. 144, Minnesota Statutes ch. 469 …

Every count in that table is measured from the file in data/ as of 2026-09-11 — not estimated, and not taken from any index page's own total.

Louisiana, Montana and South Dakota were added on 2026-09-17, counted from their files the same way. Their crawls finished on 2026-09-11 after the other states were published. A state's legislature also lists section numbers that carry no text of their own; those are not rows here. South Dakota lists 6,980 of them: every one of 25 checked at random was repealed, transferred or rejected by referendum, and its whole entry is a line such as "Repealed by SL 2006, ch 130, § 1." Louisiana lists 11, all empty at the source: reserved or redesignated numbers, plus one chapter heading with no section under it.

Illinois is the finished crawl of ftp.ilga.gov (2026-09-14, honouring its 10-second crawl delay), republished 2026-09-17 in place of the 48,587-section snapshot. Every section of the snapshot is still here with identical text. Three ids changed to the section the page itself states: 105 ILCS 40/999 (its header misprints 40/99; the section line and URL say 999), 105 ILCS 5/2-3.44 (a stray trailing period), and 205 ILCS 658/900-5 (published as 658/?). Citations are taken from the page URL, which is exact where a header is not. New York is the Consolidated Laws only — Unconsolidated Laws, Court Acts and the miscellaneous categories at nysenate.gov were out of scope for that pass.

The United States Code (jurisdiction: us, level: federal)

Taken from the Office of the Law Revision Counsel of the U.S. House of Representatives, the statutory publisher of the Code, at its release point Public Law 119-103 (2026-09-02) — one bulk download of the official USLM XML (xml_uscAll@119-103.zip), not a crawl. The Code runs to Title 54, but there is no Title 53 — the OLRC prints it as Title 53 [Reserved] — so these 53 titles are the whole Code.

title	name	sections	positive law
1	General Provisions	39	yes
2	The Congress	1,612	no
3	The President	64	yes
4	Flag and Seal, Seat of Government, and the States	47	yes
5	Government Organization and Employees	1,163	yes
6	Domestic Security	569	no
7	Agriculture	2,926	no
8	Aliens and Nationality	376	no
9	Arbitration	33	yes
10	Armed Forces	4,033	yes
11	Bankruptcy	280	yes
12	Banks and Banking	1,999	no
13	Census	70	yes
14	Coast Guard	449	yes
15	Commerce and Trade	2,701	no
16	Conservation	5,095	no
17	Copyrights	153	yes
18	Crimes and Criminal Procedure	1,399	yes
19	Customs Duties	1,111	no
20	Education	2,029	no
21	Food and Drugs	757	no
22	Foreign Relations and Intercourse	3,475	no
23	Highways	172	yes
24	Hospitals and Asylums	162	no
25	Indians	2,399	no
26	Internal Revenue Code	2,161	no
27	Intoxicating Liquors	45	no
28	Judiciary and Judicial Procedure	806	yes
29	Labor	844	no
30	Mineral Lands and Mining	626	no
31	Money and Finance	498	yes
32	National Guard	78	yes
33	Navigation and Navigable Waters	1,569	no
34	Crime Control and Law Enforcement	795	no
35	Patents	175	yes
36	Patriotic and National Observances, Ceremonies, and Organizations	1,173	yes
37	Pay and Allowances of the Uniformed Services	234	yes
38	Veterans' Benefits	1,198	yes
39	Postal Service	181	yes
40	Public Buildings, Property, and Works	459	yes
41	Public Contracts	241	yes
42	The Public Health and Welfare	8,481	no
43	Public Lands	1,464	no
44	Public Printing and Documents	356	yes
45	Railroads	294	no
46	Shipping	1,032	yes
47	Telecommunications	432	no
48	Territories and Insular Possessions	661	no
49	Transportation	1,371	yes
50	War and National Defense	1,360	no
51	National and Commercial Space Programs	249	yes
52	Voting and Elections	171	no
54	National Park Service and Related Programs	366	yes

27 titles are positive law and 26 are not; the distinction is carried per row in extra.is_positive_law, read from the XML's own <property role="is-positive-law"> and checked against the star the OLRC prints beside positive-law titles on its download page — the two agree on all 27. In a non-positive-law title the Code text is prima facie evidence of the law and the underlying Statutes at Large are legal evidence, so the distinction matters when you cite.

What is in text, and what is deliberately not:

• In: the section's own number and heading, and its operative text — subsections, paragraphs, clauses, provisos, in order.
• Out: everything USLM marks as an annotation. Editorial and statutory notes, amendment notes, codification notes, effective-date notes and the three-column tables are not statute text and are not mixed into text. The statutory source credit — (R.S. § 1979; Pub. L. 96–170 …) — is kept, but in extra.source_credit, not in the text of the law. Footnote reference marks are dropped from text and the footnotes themselves are kept in extra.footnotes.
• Retained and marked: sections that are repealed, omitted, transferred, renumbered, reserved or vacant are kept — a repealed section is often exactly what a lawyer is looking for — and flagged in extra.status (repealed 5,131, omitted 2,037, transferred 1,911, renumbered 368, vacant 17, reserved 16, unknown 1). Sections with no such flag are current (50,952).
• Not here: the US Code appendices (Titles 5, 11, 18, 28 and 50 Appendix). Those carry the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Appellate Procedure, Evidence, Criminal Procedure and Bankruptcy Procedure, which are court rules rather than statutes and live in docketx/court-rules.

Six section numbers are used twice in their own title — a real anomaly in the Code, not a parsing error. Congress has enacted two § 1932s of title 28 (Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, and Revocation of earned release credit), and the same has happened at 5 U.S.C. § 3598, 5 U.S.C. § 5757, 10 U.S.C. § 130g, 38 U.S.C. § 1167 and 40 U.S.C. § 3318. Both sections of each pair are published, with an identical citation and ids distinguished by a _d suffix; the Code itself footnotes the clash and that footnote is in extra.footnotes.

The record

Every row has the same twelve columns, all strings:

id, level (federal or state), jurisdiction (us, or the two-letter state), code, section, citation, title, text (verbatim), source (the URL), license, retrieved_at, extra.

extra is a JSON string (parse it with json.loads) carrying whatever else the source exposed — title, chapter, subchapter, part, catchline, history note, edition — so that it can differ by jurisdiction without breaking the shared schema. Federal rows add title_number, title_name, is_positive_law, identifier (the USLM path, e.g. /us/usc/t42/s1983), release_point, source_credit, status where one applies, and browse_url (the OLRC viewer page for that section).

Load it

from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("docketx/us-statutes")                       # federal + every state
usc = ds["train"].filter(lambda r: r["level"] == "federal")    # the United States Code
al  = ds["train"].filter(lambda r: r["jurisdiction"] == "al")  # one state

Coverage, stated honestly

Federal statutory law is complete: every title of the US Code at the release point named above.

The states listed are the ones whose statutes we have verified against a live official source, with the structure proven by extracting a real section before any harvest ran. A state missing from this table is one we have not yet verified — in several cases because the state licensed its code to a commercial publisher and no official machine-readable source exists. It is never a state whose law we hold and withheld. Coverage grows as each state clears that check.

Source and credit

The United States Code is prepared and published by the Office of the Law Revision Counsel of the U.S. House of Representatives, which is the publisher Congress designated for it. It is a work of the United States Government and is in the public domain — not copyrighted, and free of any licence condition. The same data is mirrored by the U.S. Government Publishing Office on govinfo.gov. Nothing here is republished from a commercial annotator: there are no headnotes, no editorial annotations and no publisher's notes in this dataset.

State codes are published by the named state legislature, legislative service or code commission, likewise as government works. Each row carries the exact URL it came from in source.

Part of the DocketX open legal corpus, alongside docketx/us-caselaw (10.8M opinions), docketx/court-rules, docketx/oral-arguments-us and docketx/us-judges.