CharlesMfouapon/olc

A public, curated, machine-readable database of African legal texts. Starting with OHADA. --- # Open Legal Corpus (OLC) ### A Public, Curated, Machine-Readable Database of African Legal Texts. The Open Legal Corpus (OLC) is an open-source initiative to digitize, structure, and preserve the foundational legal texts of African jurisdictions. It is built for legal professionals, researchers, and technologists who need reliable, structured access to African law—without scraping government websites or hunting through fragmented PDF archives. **The OLC is not a product. It is infrastructure.** --- ## Mission African legal systems are rich, complex, and deeply rooted in both colonial history and post-independence innovation. However, their primary texts—treaties, uniform acts, statutes, and landmark judgments—remain scattered across isolated government portals, outdated websites, and offline archives. The Open Legal Corpus exists to close this gap. By providing a single, curated, machine-readable source of truth, the OLC empowers: - **Legal practitioners** to conduct faster cross-jurisdictional research. - **Legal technologists** to build AI tools that actually understand African law. - **Students and academics** to study African jurisprudence with reliable citations. --- ## Current Jurisdictions | Jurisdiction | Status | Texts | Last Updated | | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | | **OHADA** | ✅ Live | 10 Uniform Acts | July 2026 | | ECOWAS | 🔜 Next | Planned | — | | EAC | 🔜 Next | Planned | — | | Cameroon (National) | 🔜 Next | Planned | — | > *The OLC is jurisdiction-agnostic by design. Any African legal system can be added.* --- ## Structure Each jurisdiction is stored as a structured JSON file in `data/`. **Schema:** ```json { "corpus_name": "OHADA Legal Corpus", "jurisdiction": "OHADA", "last_updated": "2026-07-01", "documents": [ { "id": "OHADA-UA-GCL-001", "title": "Uniform Act on General Commercial Law", "type": "Uniform Act", "year": 2010, "summary": "The foundational commercial code for OHADA.", "keywords": ["commercial law", "contracts", …