README.md

---
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](https://github.com/docketx) — [legal-scrambler](https://github.com/docketx/legal-scrambler) pseudonymises a case file on your own hardware before a frontier model sees it; [claude-for-legal](https://github.com/docketx/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 `id`s 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

```python
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](https://docketx.ai) open legal corpus, alongside `docketx/us-caselaw`
(10.8M opinions), `docketx/court-rules`, `docketx/oral-arguments-us` and `docketx/us-judges`.