legalize-no

Norwegian legislation as a Git repository — every law is a Markdown file, every amendment is a commit.

781 laws spanning from 1687 to the present day.

Inspired by legalize-es.

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Why

Norwegian law is publicly available via Lovdata's open API, but it's not version-controlled or easy to diff. This project makes the full body of Norwegian legislation:

• Searchable with standard text tools (grep, fzf, ripgrep)
• Diffable — track exactly what changed between amendments
• Programmable — structured YAML frontmatter on every file for easy parsing
• Offline — clone once, search forever

Useful for legal tech, NLP training data, academic research, and anyone who wants to git log the history of Norwegian law.

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Structure

no/
  LOV-1814-05-17.md       ← Grunnloven (Constitution)
  LOV-2005-06-17-62.md    ← Arbeidsmiljøloven (Working Environment Act)
  LOV-1902-05-22-10.md    ← Straffeloven 1902 (Penal Code)
  ...

Filenames follow Lovdata's identifier format: LOV-YYYY-MM-DD-NR.

File format

Each law is a Markdown file with YAML frontmatter:

---
title: "Kongeriket Norges Grunnlov"
short_title: "Grunnloven – Grl."
identifier: "LOV-1814-05-17"
country: "no"
rank: "lov"
lang: "nb"
publication_date: "1814-05-17"
last_change_in_force: "2024-05-21"
status: "gjeldende"
source: "https://lovdata.no/dokument/NL/lov/1814-05-17"
department: ["Justis- og beredskapsdepartementet"]
subjects: ["Grunnloven", "Stortinget"]
---
# Kongeriket Norges Grunnlov
...

Source and license

Legal texts are fetched from Lovdata's open API and licensed under NLOD 2.0.

Data source: https://api.lovdata.no/v1/publicData/get/gjeldende-lover.tar.bz2

Build locally

Requires Python 3.10+ and BeautifulSoup4.

Install dependencies, download the source data, and run the build script:

pip install beautifulsoup4
python build.py

Related projects

• legalize-es — Spanish legislation as a Git repo
• legalize — Umbrella project