ducut91/korean-statutes

📚 Korean Statutes Dataset (All Laws of Korea)

This dataset provides a comprehensive collection of 200,633 legal provisions from all Korean statutes, crawled from the Korea National Law Information Center (law.go.kr). Each entry corresponds to an individual clause (조문) within a law and includes metadata such as law name, promulgation date, enforcement date, issuing department, and more.

This dataset is ideal for legal NLP, statutory clause-level retrieval, and Korean law-aware generative AI systems.

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📦 Dataset Summary

• Total Records: 200,633
• Total Laws: 5,500
• Language: Korean (ko)
• Fields: 15 columns with English names
• Source: law.go.kr
• Contact: [email protected]
• License: This dataset is based on public legal data provided by the National Law Information Center (law.go.kr) and is freely available for anyone to use. You may use, modify, and redistribute the data for research, commercial, or educational purposes without restriction.

Each row corresponds to one clause (조문) from a law. The full law content can be retrieved via the provided LawDetailLink.

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🧾 Column Descriptions

Column Name	Description
CurrentHistoryCode	Status of the law version (e.g., "현행")
LawSerialNumber	Unique identifier for the law version
LawDetailLink	Direct API link to the full law text (in XML format)
LawNameKor	Full name of the law in Korean
LawTypeName	Type of law (e.g., "법률", "대통령령")
DepartmentName	Name of the issuing or managing ministry/agency
PromulgationNumber	Official number assigned at promulgation
RevisionTypeName	Revision type (e.g., "일부개정", "전부개정", "타법개정")
LawID	Unique identifier for the law itself (not version-specific)
EffectiveDate	Date the law goes into effect (YYYY-MM-DD)
PromulgationDate	Date the law was promulgated (YYYY-MM-DD)
LawAbbreviation	Short or abbreviated name of the law
ClauseNumber	Clause number (e.g., "2", "3의2", "5조의3"), stored as a string
ClauseTitle	Title of the clause (if present)
ClauseContent	Full text content of the clause, including subparagraphs and line breaks

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📊 Missing Value Statistics

Column Name	Missing Count	Missing Ratio (%)
DepartmentName	130	0.06%
LawAbbreviation	117,379	58.50%
ClauseTitle	12,333	6.15%
Other columns	0	0.00%

⚠️ The LawAbbreviation field is missing in over half the entries, but this does not affect core clause data.

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🛠️ Preprocessing Notes

• Crawled using the DRF Open API provided by law.go.kr.
• Each LawDetailLink is a direct link to the XML representation of the full law version.
• Long multiline clauses (including subparagraphs and notes) are preserved in ClauseContent.

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💡 Suggested Use Cases

• 🧠 Statute Summarization – Train models to summarize Korean legal texts
• 🤖 Legal QA and Chatbots – Power clause-aware legal assistant systems
• 📚 Legal Language Modeling – Use for pretraining or fine-tuning LLMs
• 🔍 Structured Legal Retrieval – Build clause-level retrieval or embedding systems

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📜 License & Purpose

This dataset is based entirely on public legal data from the Republic of Korea. According to Korean copyright law, laws and other legal texts are not subject to copyright, and may be freely:

• Used
• Modified
• Redistributed

for research, commercial, or educational purposes.

While no attribution is required, citing law.go.kr as the source is recommended.

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🎯 Motivation for Open-Sourcing

We believe that Korean law should be as accessible to developers and researchers as the laws of other major jurisdictions. However, many large language models underrepresent Korean legal content.

By releasing this dataset, we aim to:

• Promote equitable legal AI development
• Encourage multilingual legal research
• Enable the next generation of Korean legal tech

🇰🇷 A globally aware model needs to understand Korean law.

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📅 Changelog

Date	Changes Made
2025-07-25	Uploaded first version.
2025-07-27	Removed structural items (편·장·절·관) from ClauseContent; updated statistics.