metadata

license: cc-by-4.0
language:
  - en
  - bn
tags:
  - nlp
  - llm
  - legal

Bangladesh Legal Acts Dataset

A comprehensive database of Bangladesh's legal framework, containing 1484+ acts scraped and processed from the official Bangladesh Laws portal, enhanced with historical government context, legal system context, and comprehensive metadata.

Dataset Overview

Total Acts: 1,484
Total Sections: 35,633
Total Footnotes: 14,523
Languages: English, Bengali, Mixed
Format: JSON with structured metadata
Historical Context: Government periods from 1799-2025
Legal System Context: Comprehensive legal framework information
Enhanced Features: Token counts, year standardization, processing metadata
License: CC-BY 4.0

Citation

If you use this dataset in your research or project, please cite it as:

@misc{adib_sakhawat_2025,
  title     = {Bangladesh Legal Acts Dataset},
  url       = {https://www.kaggle.com/dsv/12511542},
  DOI       = {10.34740/KAGGLE/DSV/12511542},
  publisher = {Kaggle},
  author    = {Adib Sakhawat},
  year      = {2025}
}

Data Processing Pipeline

The dataset has been enhanced through multiple processing stages:

Initial Scraping: Raw legal acts data collection
Content Cleaning: Text processing and structuring
Detailed Fetching: Section-by-section content extraction
Data Combination: Merging structured data
Enhancement: Token counting and language detection
Government Context Integration: Historical government information
Legal System Context Addition: Legal framework contextualization
Year Translation: Bengali to English numeral conversion
Error Recovery: Missing context restoration
Token Count Correction: Accurate tokenization across all fields
Final Compilation: Comprehensive dataset creation

Individual Act Structure (Enhanced)

{
  "act_title": "The Penal Code, 1860",
  "act_no": "XLV",
  "act_year": "1860",
  "publication_date": "6th October, 1860",
  "language": "english",
  "token_count": 15420,
  "is_repealed": false,
  "sections": [
    {
      "section_title": "Chapter I - Introduction",
      "section_content": "This Act may be called the Penal Code..."
    }
  ],
  "footnotes": [
    {
      "footnote_text": "Extended to Bangladesh by..."
    }
  ],
  "csv_metadata": {
    "act_title_from_csv": "The Penal Code, 1860",
    "is_repealed": false
  },
  "government_context": {
    "government_name": "British Colonial Government",
    "govt_system": "Company Rule",
    "position_head_govt": "Governor-General of India",
    "head_govt_name": "Lord Canning (Charles Canning)",
    "head_govt_designation": "Governor-General of India",
    "how_got_power": "Company appointment",
    "period_years": "1856-1862",
    "years_in_power": 6,
    "context_added_at": "2025-07-19T..."
  },
  "legal_system_context": {
    "legal_framework": "British Colonial Legal System",
    "government_system": "Colonial Administration",
    "policing_system": "Imperial Police System",
    "land_relations": "Colonial Land Revenue System",
    "period": "1858-1947",
    "description": "British Crown rule with colonial administrative framework",
    "context_added_at": "2025-07-19T..."
  },
  "processing_info": {
    "government_context_source": "govt.json lookup",
    "legal_context_source": "bangladesh_legal_systems.json",
    "year_translation": "Original year retained",
    "token_count_method": "Comprehensive field tokenization",
    "last_updated": "2025-07-19T..."
  },
  "source_file": "act-print-11.json",
  "source_url": "http://bdlaws.minlaw.gov.bd/act-print-11.html",
  "fetch_timestamp": "2025-07-19 02:45:32"
}

🔍 Data Features

Enhanced Processing

Missing Data Recovery: Automatically fills gaps using CSV metadata
Token Counting: Word-level tokenization for all text content including context fields
Language Detection: Automatic detection of English/Bengali/Mixed content
Historical Government Context: Matches each act with the government system and leadership at the time of enactment
Legal System Context: Comprehensive legal framework information for each historical period
Year Standardization: Bengali to English numeral translation
Error Recovery: Automated recovery for files with missing contexts
Metadata Preservation: Maintains source URLs and timestamps

Quality Assurance

Error Handling: Robust error logging and recovery mechanisms
Data Validation: Automatic validation of combined datasets
Progress Tracking: Real-time processing progress with tqdm
Statistics: Comprehensive processing statistics and distribution analysis
Batch Processing: Memory-efficient chunked processing
Comprehensive Logging: Detailed logs for all processing stages

Government Context Features

Historical Periods: Covers government systems from 1799-2025
Leadership Information: Includes head of government names and designations
Power Transitions: Documents how each government came to power
System Classification: Categorizes different government types (Company Rule, Colonial, Democratic, Military, etc.)
Temporal Mapping: Precise year-based matching of acts to government periods

Legal System Context Features

Legal Framework Classification: Comprehensive categorization of legal systems
Government System Integration: Links legal framework to government structure
Policing System Context: Historical policing and law enforcement information
Land Relations Framework: Land ownership and revenue system context
Temporal Coverage: Complete coverage across all historical periods
Contextual Descriptions: Detailed explanations of each legal system period

📈 Dataset Statistics

Metric	Value
Total Legal Documents	1,484
Date Range	1799 - 2025
Languages	English, Bengali, Mixed
Total Sections	35,633
Total Footnotes	14,523
Government Periods Covered	50+ historical periods
Legal System Periods	12+ distinct legal frameworks
Government Systems	Company Rule, Colonial, Military, Democratic, etc.
Average Tokens per Act	~2,884
Total Dataset Tokens	2,500,000+
Processing Scripts	10+ specialized processing tools
Processing Time	~30 minutes (complete pipeline)

🛠️ Technical Details

Scraping Process

Respectful scraping: 300ms delays between requests
Error resilience: Continues processing despite individual failures
Memory optimization: Batch processing for large datasets
Rate limiting: Prevents server overload

Data Processing

Batch optimization: Processes 50-100 items per batch
Memory efficiency: Streaming JSON writing for large files
Unicode support: Full Bengali/English text support
Incremental processing: Skip already processed files
Chunked processing: Optimized memory usage for large datasets
Government context fusion: Efficient lookup-based government matching
Legal context integration: Temporal period matching algorithms
Token counting: Regex-based comprehensive tokenization
Error recovery: Automated detection and correction of processing errors

Processing Pipeline Features

Modular Design: Each processing stage is independent and reusable
Progress Tracking: Real-time progress bars and statistics
Comprehensive Logging: File and console logging for all operations
Memory Management: Garbage collection and chunked processing
Error Resilience: Continues processing despite individual file failures
Statistics Generation: Detailed processing and content statistics

Historical Government Context

The dataset includes comprehensive historical government context for each legal act, covering:

Government Systems Covered

Company Rule (1799-1858): East India Company administration
British Colonial Rule (1858-1947): Direct British Crown rule
Pakistan Period (1947-1971): Dominion and Republic of Pakistan
Bangladesh Independence (1971-present): Various democratic and military governments

Context Information

Government system type and duration
Head of government name and official designation
Method of acquiring power (election, appointment, coup, etc.)
Exact period years for historical accuracy

This historical context enables researchers to:

Analyze legal evolution across different political systems
Study the impact of government changes on legislation
Understand the political circumstances surrounding specific laws
Conduct temporal analysis of legal frameworks

Contributing

Fork the repository
Create a feature branch (git checkout -b feature/amazing-feature)
Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add amazing feature')
Push to the branch (git push origin feature/amazing-feature)
Open a Pull Request

Legal Notice

This dataset contains legal documents from the Bangladesh government. While the data is publicly available, please:

Verify accuracy for legal purposes
Check for updates on the official portal
Respect the original source attribution

License

This work is licensed under CC-BY 4.0.

You are free to:

Share and redistribute
Adapt and transform
Use commercially

With attribution to this repository.

Contact

For questions about this dataset, please open an issue in this repository.

Disclaimer: This is an unofficial compilation. For legal purposes, always refer to the official Bangladesh Laws portal.

Datasets:

sakhadib
/

Bangladesh-Legal-Acts-Dataset