dataset_card_legislation.md

license	other
language	de fr it rm
tags	legal swiss-law legislation statutes fedlex
pretty_name	Swiss Legislation (Federal + Cantonal, article-level)
size_categories	100K<n<1M
configs	config_name data_files federal federal/*.parquet config_name data_files cantonal cantonal/*.parquet

Swiss Legislation (article-level)

Private companion to voilaj/swiss-caselaw. Article-level export of Swiss statutory law: 751,017 article rows across two configs.

• federal (federal/fedlex.parquet) — 401,313 article rows from Fedlex (the Federal Council's official consolidated law portal, SPARQL-sourced). Public domain.
• cantonal (cantonal/<canton>.parquet, one shard per canton) — 349,704 article rows across all 26 cantons. Sourced by direct scraping of the official cantonal law portals for 23 cantons, with LexFind for JU, SZ, VD and ZH's gaps. The text_source column preserves this provenance per row.

Why private

Fedlex is public-domain and freely redistributable. The cantonal side mixes direct-portal text with LexFind-fallback rows, whose bulk republication we keep private. A federal-only public release is a separate, later decision. Treat this repo as an internal working mirror, not a redistribution.

Schema

federal

column	type	notes
sr_number	string	Systematic Compilation (SR) number
law_title	string	title in the article's language
abbreviation	string	official abbreviation
article_num	string	e.g. Art. 41
heading	string	marginal note / article heading
text	string	verbatim article text
language	string	de / fr / it (/ rm)
consolidation_date	string	Fedlex consolidation date
work_uri	string	Fedlex work URI
source	string	always fedlex

cantonal

column	type	notes
canton	string	2-letter canton code
sr_number	string	cantonal systematic number (where available)
law_title	string
category	string	subject category
article_num	string
seq	int64	article order within the law
heading	string
text	string	verbatim article text
language	string
is_active	int64	1 = currently in force
text_source	string	provenance label: direct-portal scraper id (e.g. zhlex_pdf) vs lexfind fallback
original_url	string	source document URL
version_active_since	string	version validity start
lexfind_id	string	LexFind law id (join key)
source	string	always cantonal

Provenance and freshness

Derived from the same nightly pipeline that backs mcp.opencaselaw.ch (statutes.db for federal, cantonal_laws.db for cantonal). Rows with empty article text are excluded. Not a substitute for the official portals for legally-binding text; the original_url / work_uri columns point back to the authoritative source.

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

fed = load_dataset("voilaj/swiss-legislation", "federal", split="train")
zh  = load_dataset("voilaj/swiss-legislation", "cantonal",
                   data_files="cantonal/zh.parquet", split="train")

Licensed data upstream: Fedlex (public domain); cantonal portals + LexFind under their respective terms. CC0 does not apply to the cantonal LexFind-fallback rows.