endomorphosis/ipfs_bermuda_laws

Bermuda Laws (bermudalaws.bm / Official Gazette)

Research snapshot of official national legislation from bermudalaws.bm (Attorney-General's Chambers Drafting Section / Bermuda Laws Online) / Official Gazette (gov.bm).

Not legal advice. The official gazette / authentic source prevails over this corpus.

Snapshot

Field	Value
Snapshot date	2026-09-25
Coverage	catalog-backed; every fetchable bermudalaws.bm catalog row collected
Source	bermudalaws.bm (Attorney-General's Chambers Drafting Section / Bermuda Laws Online) / Official Gazette (gov.bm)
Collector	scrapers/collect_bm.py
Laws / instruments	1,783
Articles	28,040
Retrieval	1,743 live from bermudalaws.bm / gov.bm; 40 from Wayback captures of official URLs
Language	en
Jurisdiction	Bermuda
License	bm-bermudalaws-official-texts

Contents

• data/laws.parquet — one row per instrument.
• data/articles.parquet — article/section rows for the same snapshot.
• scrapers/collect_bm.py — research collector used to build this snapshot.
• scrapers/_bm_dedup_batch.py — batch runner with duplicate pre-filter, post-fetch dedupe, legacy-to-current URL remap, and error-page / non-legislation / binary-garbage rejection.
• scrapers/ctrlchars.py — length-preserving control-character normaliser.
• scrapers/_bm_zero_article_split.py — splitter used only on instruments that had 0 articles after the standard split.
• scrapers/_bm_wayback_to_live.py — Wayback-to-live swap pass (v10).

License / reuse

Official Bermuda Laws Online / Official Gazette texts (Crown Copyright); authentic Official Gazette / Bermuda Laws Online prevails; consolidations may lack full official sanction — verify; not legal advice.

This dataset is not legal advice. The official source prevails.

Provenance

• Base: Hub tip 7fa632b7 (v9: 1,783 laws / 27,854 articles). This pack (bm_wayback_to_live_v10, 2026-09-25) adds no new laws. It re-fetches Wayback-sourced laws from the live official site.
• Wayback-to-live swap: each of the 149 laws that came from Wayback captures was fetched again from its current bermudalaws.bm URL (or official gov.bm URL). Wayback was never used for this. A law was swapped only if all three held:
  • the live text is the same instrument (its title appears in the text);
  • the live text is at least as long as the Wayback text;
  • the live text splits into at least as many articles.
• 109 laws were swapped. For 75 the live text is byte-identical, so their article split was kept and only the source URL changed. For 34 the live text is longer and was re-split with the pack's standard splitter. Each swapped law keeps its Wayback URL and its pre-swap text hash, length and article count in metadata, and carries swapped_wayback_to_live: true.
• 40 laws were not swapped and stay exactly as before: 21 have no live copy at any current official URL, 13 have a shorter live copy, and 6 have a live copy that splits into fewer articles. The swap table and the per-law reasons are in MANIFEST.md.
• Pack-wide, 1,743 instruments now come from the live official site and 40 from Wayback captures of official URLs (v9: 1,634 / 149).
• Batch 9 (v9, the final catalog batch) added 249 instruments, all fetched live. The bermudalaws.bm catalog is exhausted.
• Zero-article pass (bm_zero_article_v1, v9): it ran only on the 128 instruments that still had 0 articles (104 from v8 plus 24 new ones), and all 128 now have articles, adding 306 article rows. 122 were split on their numbered sections. 6 one-paragraph proclamations and notices each got one article holding the operative text between the enacting formula and the signature. Schedules become extra articles. Empty, garbage or boilerplate-only text produces no article. No article row of any other instrument changed.
• Duplicate checks (byte hash plus strict and loose same-Act names) kept duplicate copies of existing instruments out.
• No non-official or third-party sources were used.
• Control characters: C0/C1 control characters and carriage returns are normalized across the whole pack. They were replaced, not deleted, so every row keeps its exact character length. None remain.

Replaced error-page rows (approved exception, since v6)

Three rows from the original tip held a captured SharePoint error page instead of law text. Their ids are kept, and each now holds the live official consolidation from bermudalaws.bm. The old content hash is kept in metadata as error_page_content_sha256, together with replaced_error_page: true and the old and new URL and fetch method.

id	before	after
bm-consol_clean_air_act	500 chars, 0 articles (error page)	Clean Air Act 1991, 70,576 chars, 61 articles
bm-consol_bermuda_constitution_2	499 chars, 0 articles (error page)	Bermuda Constitution Order 1968, 281,972 chars, 90 articles
bm-consol_bermuda_international_conciliation_and_arbitration_act_1993.pdf	466 chars, 0 articles (error page)	Bermuda International Conciliation and Arbitration Act 1993, 118,414 chars, 127 articles

Each replacement is text-identical to the existing live copy of the same Act elsewhere in the pack.

Source

• https://www.bermudalaws.bm/

Known gaps

The catalog is exhausted: all 2,486 bermudalaws.bm catalog rows are either in the pack, duplicates of an instrument in the pack, or not retrievable. 200 rows are not retrievable: 62 return 404 or an app-shell page, 118 have titles cut off in the catalog, and 20 have garbled URLs. Every instrument has at least one article. 40 instruments still come from Wayback captures of official URLs; the live re-fetch pass found no usable live copy for them (see MANIFEST.md). Identical-text groups: 20 pairs and 2 triples (8 more consolidations now match an existing live copy of the same Act), kept so that no ids are dropped. Section splits of annual Acts can include some schedule-line or cross-reference rows. Skips bills, drafts, fact sheets and judgments. Not vLex.