In practice, it does. A state's regulations sit behind a login. Court rules are scanned PDFs nobody can search. The annotated code that actually tells you what a statute means costs more per year than a legal aid clinic spends on rent. The people who most need to read the law are the least able to pay for the privilege, and everyone in this industry knows it and quietly accepts it.

We are not accepting it.

So here is every US statute, regulation, constitution, court rule and agency guidance document we could get our hands on. Pulled from official government sources. Cleaned, parsed, deduplicated, structured, and handed over. Three million sections. No key, no quota, no seat licence, no sales call, no contract, no catch. Download it and do whatever you like with it, including building something that competes with us.

We built this because somebody had to, and because the people who could have done it years ago decided the paywall was more interesting.

If a tenant facing eviction, a solo attorney with no research budget, a clinic with three staff, or one stubborn developer in a garage ends up with the same raw material as a firm paying six figures a year for it, then this was worth every hour.

And selfishly: this is what we want to be remembered for. Not a product. This. That some people were crazy enough to take an entire country's law, put it in a file, and give it away.

If it helps one person get a fair hearing they would not otherwise have got, it has already paid for itself.

Use it. Break it. Build on it. Tell us what is wrong with it.

Built by Priyansh Khodiyar and the team at Vaquill AI. If you find an error, a gap, or a provision we got wrong, tell us and we will fix it in the next release.

2,978,617 sections of US primary law in one schema. Snapshot v2026.08, 229 files, 4.09 GB of Parquet.

This release supersedes v2026.07, which contained statutes and constitutions only. v2026.08 is the first to publish court rules, agency guidance, and the federal ruling, treaty and presidential-document sets.

Questions, ideas, or want to help? DM me on LinkedIn.

Watch the walkthrough

US 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.

What is in it

Corpora that span many jurisdictions:

Corpus	Sections	Jurisdictions
Statutes (state, territorial, and the US Code)	1,997,490	51
Regulations (state and federal)	885,121	17
Court rules	43,809	44
Agency guidance (including state insurance bulletins)	25,461	50
Constitutions	13,382	52

Federal-only corpora, where a jurisdiction count would be meaningless:

Corpus	Sections
Agency rulings	7,248
Presidential proclamations	1,832
IRS notices	759
Executive orders	738
Presidential documents	655
Agency FAQs	444
Agency memoranda	401
IRS revenue procedures	377
Guidelines	302
IRS revenue rulings	245
Enforcement actions	140
Treaties	119
IRS announcements	83
Administrative guidance	11

Agency guidance includes 53,774 state insurance department bulletins across 49 states, published here as structured data for the first time.

Licensing, stated precisely

The legal 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.

No third-party-licensed content is included in this release.

Using the data vs the API

This dataset is free for everyone. It is CC BY 4.0, so you can use it for anything, including commercial work, as long as you attribute it. You never need to email us or ask permission. Just download it.

We also run an optional hosted API: the same law, kept up to date and searchable section by section, so you do not have to run the scrapers yourself.

Want to try it right now? Sign up at app.vaquill.ai and generate an API key. Every account gets 500 free credits, no email needed.
Non-commercial use of the API is free. If you are a legal aid organization, a researcher, a student, or building a non-commercial or open-source project and need more than the free credits, email contact@vaquill.ai and we will send you a free API key. Use this exact subject line so we can route it fast:

Open US Law API - non-commercial - <your use case>

Tell us briefly who you are and what you are building. The free key is best-effort and rate-limited, with no uptime guarantee. The dataset itself has none of those limits.
Commercial use of the API is paid. Details at vaquill.ai/legal-api.
Want it built for you? We also build products, workflows, and pipelines on top of this data. Email contact@vaquill.ai.

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: 2,895,103
repealed: 60,614
reserved: 11,151
superseded: 4,036
transferred: 3,038
omitted: 1,834
renumbered: 1,434
rescinded: 1,079
expired: 215
recodified: 53
vacant: 21
plus revoked, terminated, withdrawn, not_funded, unconstitutional, vetoed, inactive

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

One row is one section. Long provisions are stored internally as multiple chunks and reassembled here, so a row is the complete text.

Statute coverage by jurisdiction

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

Jurisdiction	Statute sections	Size
United States Code (federal)	54,853	75.6 MB
CA	161,566	53.3 MB
MS	158,688	55.9 MB
TX	122,535	28.3 MB
IN	83,148	20.2 MB
IL	72,456	20.4 MB
NJ	55,993	22.8 MB
WA	51,498	21.6 MB
NV	48,190	15.2 MB
AL	45,984	18.0 MB
LA	43,512	21.5 MB
MI	40,658	19.7 MB
NY	40,140	32.6 MB
SD	39,589	10.0 MB
MD	39,552	15.0 MB
AR	36,936	18.6 MB
OR	36,202	17.6 MB
OK	35,329	17.9 MB
NM	34,455	12.8 MB
CO	34,231	20.3 MB
VA	33,857	16.2 MB
OH	33,161	19.5 MB
TN	32,693	18.2 MB
MT	30,514	12.0 MB
SC	29,947	12.2 MB
MO	29,309	15.8 MB
ND	29,042	10.6 MB
IA	28,223	12.3 MB
MN	27,747	20.1 MB
NE	25,997	11.6 MB
UT	25,880	13.9 MB
WV	25,664	13.9 MB
NH	25,375	10.0 MB
ME	25,316	14.6 MB
FL	24,866	20.5 MB
KS	24,361	11.8 MB
DC	23,694	9.9 MB
PR	23,636	10.9 MB
VT	23,521	10.2 MB
MA	23,152	13.2 MB
ID	22,754	11.3 MB
AZ	22,674	12.3 MB
DE	21,649	10.4 MB
RI	21,107	8.1 MB
WY	20,999	7.6 MB
KY	20,894	12.3 MB
HI	19,197	8.6 MB
WI	18,158	12.6 MB
AK	17,935	6.8 MB
CT	16,082	11.5 MB
PA	14,571	7.0 MB

Sourcing

Every section in this release comes from a government publisher, or from a body a government designates to publish the law: state supreme courts and bar associations that publish the rules they administer, state compilation commissions, and contracted official publishers. The build refuses to publish a file containing a non-government source URL, so this is enforced rather than asserted.

Georgia and North Carolina statutes were withdrawn on 2026-08-12. Their section bodies carried the source site's own navigation and footer text, so they were not clean statutory text. They are being re-ingested from an official publisher. Earlier downloads of v2026.07 still contain them.

Honest limitations

This is a dated snapshot, not a live feed. 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, since states differ enormously in how they subdivide.
Not all sections carry a source link.
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.

Verifying your download

SHA256SUMS.json lists every file with its SHA-256, row count and byte size.

import hashlib, json
sums = json.load(open("SHA256SUMS.json"))
for entry in sums:
    h = hashlib.sha256(open(entry["file"], "rb").read()).hexdigest()
    assert h == entry["sha256"], entry["file"]

totals.json gives the section count per corpus.

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/index.html
Everything in one file: https://oss-data-us.vaquill.ai/v2026.08/open-us-law-v2026.08-parquet.tar (4.09 GB)
Machine manifest (per-file SHA256): https://oss-data-us.vaquill.ai/index.json

The mirror is byte-identical to the Hub, carries the same SHA-256 for every file, and supports HTTP range requests, so you can query the Parquet directly without downloading it. index.json and latest.json always describe the current snapshot, so those two URLs never change between releases.

Loading

from datasets import load_dataset

# a whole corpus
ds = load_dataset("vaquill/open-us-law", "statutes", split="train")
rules = load_dataset("vaquill/open-us-law", "court_rules", split="train")

# one jurisdiction
ca = load_dataset("vaquill/open-us-law", data_files="us_ca_statutes.parquet")

Files are named us_{jurisdiction}_{corpus}.parquet, so any subset is a glob.

More open source from Vaquill AI

Everything below is public and Apache-2.0 or CC BY unless noted.

Data and benchmarks

open-legal-answer-benchmark - reproducible benchmark of US legal-answer quality. Verified questions, a standard-library scorer, results anyone can rerun.
legal-mt-benchmark - English to Hindi legal machine translation on the WMT25 Legal Domain Test Suite, 7 metrics, all outputs published.

MCP servers

courtlistener-mcp - CourtListener (US federal and state courts, PACER, eCFR). Hosted, bring your own key.
canlii-mcp - CanLII, the Canadian legal database.
vaquill-mcp - the Vaquill research API over USC, CFR, state law and case law.
integrations - Slack, Discord, Teams, WhatsApp, Telegram and WordPress connectors.

Tools for the way lawyers actually work

ms-word-addin - contract review, playbooks, drafting and research inside Word.
google-docs-addon - the same for Google Docs, with native tracked-change redlines.

Reference

awesome-legaltech - a curated list of open source legal tech, models, datasets and companies.
playbooks - attorney-grade negotiation playbooks for US commercial contracts, clause by clause.

Citation

@misc{openuslaw202608,
  title  = {Open US Law: Structured Primary Law of the United States},
  author = {Vaquill AI},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {Snapshot v2026.08},
  url    = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/vaquill/open-us-law}
}

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