houritsu README

houritsu

Every Japanese law (法令) as git history. One commit is one amending law coming into force: git log laws/act/415/415AC0000000057.md is the amendment history of the Personal Information Protection Act, and git show <commit> is what one amendment changed.

Before v1.0, history may be rebuilt and force-pushed.

Layout

laws/<law type>/<first 3 characters of the ID>/<e-Gov law ID>.md, with metadata in YAML frontmatter. The first 3 characters are the era and year of promulgation (415 = 平成15年).
Tables are HTML (merged cells kept). Figures and 様式 are links to the attachment on e-Gov, on a line of their own, or as an HTML link inside a sentence or a table cell. About 3 in 10 figures have no attachment there and show （図：e-Gov に画像なし） instead.
The table of contents (目次) is left out: it only repeats the headings.
main: enforced revisions. upcoming: promulgated but not yet in force.
Commit date = enforcement date (00:00 JST). Trailers: Amendment-Law-Id, Enforced; for an amending Act, also Bill (the Diet bill), Bill-Submitter (who submitted it, e.g. 内閣 or 神谷宗幣君外四名) and Bill-Url (its text on the House of Representatives site, where the bill's 理由 is). Skipped-Revision names a revision e-Gov has no text for; the commit's diff covers it too. git cannot record dates before 1970, so earlier ones are recorded as 1970-01-02; the real date is in the Enforced trailer and the frontmatter.
An amendment whose enforcement day is not fixed yet has enforced: "undetermined" and Enforced: undetermined, and is the last commit on upcoming (dated 2117-12-31, the placeholder e-Gov uses). enforcement_comment in the frontmatter words the day as the amending law does (e.g. 政令で定める日); with it, an upcoming date is e-Gov's estimate.
A repealed law's file is deleted in the repealing law's commit; its history stays in git log -- <file>.

Limits

History starts around 2015, not at enactment. e-Gov's revision data ramps up from about 2015 (a few hundred commits a year before, about two thousand a year from 2019), so a time series of commit dates measures e-Gov's coverage as much as legislation.
git blame dates the coverage, not the wording. A law's oldest commit holds every line that existed before coverage began: most of 刑法 blames to its 2016 commit. Read it as "already there by then".
Many laws have little history. About a third of laws have a single commit.
A law enters at its oldest e-Gov revision. Checking out an old date shows no file for a law e-Gov covers only later, not its older text: about 2,800 laws at 2010-01-01 against 9,000 now.
Commit SHAs are not stable before v1.0. A rebuild keeps them only while the data and the builder are unchanged; a builder change, or e-Gov adding a revision dated before existing commits, rewrites every later SHA. Refer to a revision by its law_id and revision_id (both in the frontmatter) instead.

Finding a law

File names are e-Gov law IDs, which stay the same when a title changes. Search the frontmatter by title:

git grep -l '^title: "個人情報の保護に関する法律"' -- laws

Following one article

Heading depth depends on the chapters around an article, so match any depth:

git log -L '/^##*  *第十六条/,/^##*  *第十七条/:laws/act/415/415AC0000000057.md'

This takes the first match, the main text. For an article of a 附則, start the range at that 附則's heading, which names its amending law: /^## 附　則（令和二年/,/^## 附　則/.

出典 / Source

出典：e-Gov法令検索（https://laws.e-gov.go.jp/）、PDL1.0（https://www.digital.go.jp/resources/open_data/public_data_license_v1.0）

e-Gov法令検索の法令データ（法令API v2）を houritsu-builder（Kohei-Wada）が markdown に加工して作成。条文の文字は変更していない（markdown のための見出し記号とエスケープ、図へのリンクを加えた）。正本は官報。改正履歴は e-Gov が提供する範囲に限る。

議案との対応：衆議院議案データベース（smartnews-smri、MIT）。議案番号と本文ページへのリンクのみ使用。

The characters of the statute text are unchanged; headings, markdown escapes and figure links are added. This is not the official text; the official text is the 官報. Revision history is limited to what e-Gov provides.

License

CC BY 4.0, which PDL1.0 §1.7 allows for the source data. Attribute as in the section above. The statute text itself is not copyrighted (著作権法第13条).

No warranty: this is not legal advice, and the text may be out of date or wrong. Check e-Gov or the 官報 before relying on it.

Lint

uvx [email protected] check

359 ·GitHub

Houritsu

What is this?

Every Japanese law as a git repository: each commit is one amending law coming into force, built from the e-Gov law API.

Is it a code library or just a set of text files?

It's a data repository, not a program. Each law is a markdown file with YAML frontmatter, and the git history is the amendment timeline.

How do I see how a law was amended over time?

Clone the repo and run git log on the law's file, for example git log laws/act/415/415AC0000000057.md for the Personal Information Protection Act. Use git show to see what one amendment changed.

Do I need anything beyond git?

No. The README's examples use only git log and git show. No account, API key or separate install is mentioned.

Do the commit dates show when each law was really written?

Not exactly. History starts around 2015, so commit dates reflect e-Gov's data coverage as much as legislation. git blame dates when text was covered, not when it was written.

What is the difference between the main and upcoming branches?

main holds revisions already in force. upcoming holds laws that are promulgated but not yet in force, and its last commit is dated 2117-12-31 when the enforcement day is still undetermined.

How do I find a law if I only know its title?

File names are e-Gov law IDs that stay the same when a title changes, so search the YAML frontmatter for the title instead.

What happens to a repealed law's files?

Its file is deleted in the commit of the repealing law, but its history stays visible in git log for the old path.

Will an old checkout include every law?

No. A law that e-Gov covers only from later dates does not appear in older checkouts. About 2,800 laws exist at 2010-01-01, against 9,000 now.

Creator: Kohei-Wada
Size: 145.6 MB
Stars: 359
Updated: CommitNov 01
Age: 20d
Commits · 90 Days