>
<h2 id="introduction">Introduction<a class="anchor" aria-label="anchor" href="#introduction"></a>
</h2>
<p>Dozens of political scientists and legal scholars use data on
European Union laws in their research. The provenance of these data is
rarely discussed. More often than not, researchers resort to the quick
and dirty technique of scraping entire html pages from
<code>eur-lex.europa.eu</code>. This is not the optimal, nor preferred
(from the perspective of the server host) approach of retrieving data,
ho