global-law

A closer look at global-law

What global-law is on GitHub

This repository arranges many countries' law repositories into a single git history where each commit represents one law taking effect. Each country's law lives in its own lexifina/-law repo and is included here as a submodule when it contains real in-force text.

The project aims to let you trace every word to the law that wrote it for any country and any date, and it keeps an interleaved chronology of in-force changes across jurisdictions.

What you can actually do here

Use plain git commands to explore the world chronology: git log --first-parent shows laws taking effect in order; git grep --recurse-submodules searches the law in force at a commit; git diff --submodule=diff shows changes between moments.

There are tooling options: law.py and a Model Context Protocol server (tools/mcp_server.py) let clients ask what a provision said on a date, who wrote each word, compare dates, find histories, check citations, and more. The repo includes tests, MCP documentation, and build scripts.

Who will find it useful

People who need verifiable, date-specific snapshots of statutory text across jurisdictions - lawyers, legal tech builders, researchers and maintainers of law corpora - will appreciate being able to pin words and commits to the law that produced them.

Anyone comfortable using git and repository submodules will get the most out of it, since the workspace relies on git worktrees, submodule updates and reading in-repo metadata like manifest.json and corpus READMEs.

Questions people ask about global-law

Can I ask what a statute said on a past date?

Yes - the tools (law.py and the MCP server) and the repository history let you read a provision as it stood on a given YYYY-MM-DD, and they state where each record starts and ends.

Does this repo modify the corpus repositories?

No - the build assembles submodules here; the MCP server reads the repository and changes nothing, and each corpus remains its own repository under its own terms.

What if a corpus was rebuilt or corrected?

When a corpus is rebuilt and force-pushed, you should run git submodule update --init and inside that corpus git fetch --force --tags to get the updated commits and tags.

global-law was shared on NexURLs by Nexis on October 31, 2026, in Tech & AI.