Bangladesh Legal Acts Dataset

This dataset provides a comprehensive, structured, and contextually enriched archive of 1,484 legal acts of Bangladesh spanning from 1799 to 2025. The data was scraped from the official Bangladesh Laws Portal, cleaned, and enhanced with historical government context and legal system metadata to support advanced legal, historical, and NLP research.

Each act is provided as structured JSON, with the following features:

Full section-wise text

Footnotes and metadata

Language classification (English, Bengali, Mixed)

Token counts for NLP applications

Government context: political system, leader, method of rule, and temporal period

Legal system context: legal framework, policing model, land relations, and historical description

The dataset supports applications in legal NLP, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), cross-lingual law modeling, historical analysis of governance, and more.

Key Features:

Total Acts: 1,484

Total Sections: 35,633

Time Span: 1799–2025

Languages: English, Bengali, Mixed

Tokenized: Word-level token counts for each act

Historical Coverage: Company Rule, British Colonial Era, Pakistan Period, Post-Independence Bangladesh

Legal System Types: 12+ frameworks including Colonial, Military, Democratic systems

Format: JSON (with scripts for processing)

Usage:

This dataset is ready to be used for:

Legal corpus exploration

Time-series legal policy tracking

Machine learning and classification tasks

Retrieval and chatbot systems in Bangla/English

Multilingual document modeling

Scripts used for scraping, cleaning, and enrichment are included in the accompanying repository to ensure transparency and reproducibility.