civil-legal-system reference-request
Where to find all laws/codes/statutes/etc. for every legal system / country online?
<p>I found this <a href="https://www.constituteproject.org/countries/Africa/Algeria?lang=en" rel="nofollow noreferrer">constituteproject.org</a>, which seems to have the constitutions for every country in a nice and easy to parse format online. I see the US Code <a href="https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/uscode/2020/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>, and the <a href="https://www.loc.gov/collections/united-states-statutes-at-large/about-this-collection/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">statutes at large</a> for the US. That's all I have found for US stuff, is there any more to be found in terms of legal documents? Then the main part of the question is, what about finding this similar information for other legal systems around the world, is there any straightforward way to do that? Or must I go dig into each country's website and figure it out for each specific case, there is nothing centralized/standard?</p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_States_Statutes_at_Large" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Wikipedia</a> has a statutes at large in text format starting it seems, but nothing in the US goes back to the 1700's in computer readable text format it seems, unless I missed it.</p>

<h1>Nowhere Collectively</h1>
<p>The US doesn't know the number of laws on all the federal, state, and city books. Often the lowest level of laws and ordinances are only in a city database, and sometimes not on the internet.</p>
<p>As a result, there is already an impossibility to get all the laws in the US in one database - and there are even countries that have not taken any steps to make their laws accessible on the internet at all. For example North Korean Law.</p>
<p>This is compounded by different entities proclaiming their laws and regulations in only their own language and on different proclamation platforms. Where available at all, the countries have country-wide laws and ordinances on their own dedicated websites. But again, federalism for the win: there will be different proclamation platforms for lower levels of legislation.</p>
<p>For example <a href="/questions/tagged/germany" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;germany&#39;" rel="tag">germany</a> has its justice department host <a href="https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/</a> which hosts all federal german laws. Schleswig Holstein hosts their state-level laws in corporation with the service Juris on <a href="https://www.gesetze-rechtsprechung.sh.juris.de/jportal/portal/page/bsshoprod.psml" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.gesetze-rechtsprechung.sh.juris.de/jportal/portal/page/bsshoprod.psml</a> and the town of Kiel has all of its ordinances and special orders on <a href="https://www.kiel.de/de/politik_verwaltung/ortsrecht_bekanntmachungen/index.php" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.kiel.de/de/politik_verwaltung/ortsrecht_bekanntmachungen/index.php</a></p>
<h1>Why a conglomerate is a bad idea</h1>
<p>Now, making a conglomerate of all the laws is actually a bad idea for several reasons:</p>
<ol>
<li>Updates. The different entities that are in making regulations with the force of law only update their official proclamation site. Often, such changes are not announced too loudly for the lowest levels, and with the number of cities in a single federal state, it's near impossible to keep the database up to date on a complete level. This is why different databases usually only scrape the federal levels.</li>
<li>Scraping will break <em>quickly</em>. Each of the websites I pointed to in Germany has a different system setup, making scraping these websites for the relevant information basically useless. Compounding that, City ordinance pages are redesigned at a somewhat elevated pace, resulting in the scraping of these pages to break quickly, even if you manage to set it up.</li>
<li>Citability. In a court of law, only the official text is relevant. If an update is missed, then the whole text is useless - you'll have to look up the actual, currently in-force version of the law or ordinance, so the conglomerate is not helping.</li>
<li>You want a ginormous database. In some countries, judgments also make law as precedent. So you want <strong>every</strong> judgment in your database. Which quickly runs into a different problem: <a href="https://law.stackexchange.com/a/56593/10334">The US alone generates <strong>millions</strong> per day.</a></li>
</ol>
