republic-os/docs/legislation.md

The Legislation Corpus

Enacted state legislation, all 50 states — the merged pull requests of American law, where the U.S. Code corpus is the deployed branch.

What's here

197,131 records under legislation/us/states/{st}/{session}/, one file per enacted bill or resolution, from the OpenStates bulk snapshot vintage 2026-07-01. Each record carries the bill's version chain (the diff), action timeline (the PR events), sponsors (the authors), roll-call votes (the merge decisions), and a source_hash over the raw record.

"Enacted" includes joint and concurrent resolutions, not only bills — the classification frontmatter field records which. Some states resolve prolifically (Tennessee's 22,173 enacted = 8,785 bills + 13,388 joint resolutions); the mirror records what the legislature enacted and leaves filtering to views.

A bill is a pull request against the law: filed, revised through committee substitutes (the commits), voted on (the reviews), and — if it passes and is signed — merged. Enacted bills are the ones that merged.

Provenance

• Source: OpenStates bulk snapshot (data.openstates.org), aggregated from official legislature sites. Confidence: reported.
• Raw JSONL (~1.1 GB, 50 files) lives off-repo on the depot at /exports/legislation/2026-07-01/; the committed anchor is data/sources/legislation_manifest_2026-07-01.json with per-state SHA-256, byte counts, and record counts.
• Rebuild: make legislation (requires the depot mount; LEG_STATES="fl ca" and LEG_VINTAGE= overridable). Deterministic — rerun is byte-identical.

Next vintages

A future OpenStates snapshot re-exported over this tree surfaces only real legislative change as diffs — new bills, new actions, new enactments. The difference between two vintages is the changelog of American state law.

Not yet

No bill → sponsor edges to Person nodes yet — that needs name reconciliation (the OpenStates person_id is not the repo's identity), a follow-on axis like the committee-seat and authority edges. And no bill text: the version chain records the diff points and links to each version's source document, but the statutory text itself is not mirrored in this pass.